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SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR 




The Italian Flag on Monte Santo (Aug. -Sept. 1917). 

In the background Monte San Gabriele is visible, and the upper of the two 
white ribands on it is the Sella di Dol road. In the bottom right-hand corner the 
Isonzo is visible, flowing between Monte Sabotino and Monte San Gabriele. 



SCENES FROM 
ITALY'S WAR 



BY 



G. M. TREVELYAN 

Late Fellow of Trinity Collega, Cambridge ; Author of 

" Garibaldi and the Thousand^* etc. ; Commandant of 

First British Red Cross Unit for Italy, August igij 

to December igiS 



WITH FRONTISPIECE AND TWELVE MAPS 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
1919 



or 



TO 
MY FRIEND 



FILIPPO DE FILIPPI, K.C.I.E. 

TRUE SON OF ITALY 
TRUE FRIEND OF ENGLAND 



"My heart goes out to the poor little families all 
over this great kingdom who stood the brunt and 
strain of the war, and gave their men gladly to 
make other men free, and other women and 
children free. These are the people, and many 
like them, to whom, after all, we owe the glory 
of this great achievement." 

President Wilson at Rome, 
January 3, 1919. 



ERRATA. 

Page i6 (last line of page), " Erzeberger" should be Erzberger. 
Page 22 (line 2), " Erzeberger" should be Erzberger. 
Page 84 (line 8), " Bersagliere ciclisti " should be BersagUeri 
ciclisti. 

Page 183 (line 4), " eight and twelve " should be six and nine. 
Page 222 (line 5), " November" should be October. 
Page 222 (line 20), "November" should be October. 



J 



! 



PREFACE 

Some Italian friends whose opinion I value have asked 
me to spend the leisure hours of this winter * (1918- 
1919) in placing on record impressions of my first three 
years' service with the Italian army. I have had special 
opportunities, if only I had had special qualifications, to 
observe the spirit of that army and the character of the 
subalpine war. Since the first days of September 19 15 
I have been in command of a Unit of British Red Cross 
ambulances carrying Italian sick and wounded from the 
advanced dressing-stations, as a part of the regular service 
of various Italian army corps. We had been engaged 
in this work for a year and a half before the arrival of 
General Hamilton's batteries, the first British regular 
troops on the Italian front, and for more than two years 
before the arrival of the British army. 

* Since I wrote this Preface and the first third of the book, the 
winter's leisure has been interrupted by the brief campaign in which the 
Italians captured 300,000 men and 5,000 guns, liberated Trieste and 
Trento, and forced Austria to surrender. That part of the book 
stands as first written, with the alteration or addition of a very- 
few sentences referring to the end of the war. 



X PREFACE. 

We have thus, for more than three years, been Hvnig 
in constant daily contact with Italians of all ranks, some- 
times joining their messes, always receiving their orders, 
discussing points of service with them, loading our 
ambulances daily with their sick and wounded. Our 
Unit also had for two years a field hospital for Italian 
soldiers. These opportunities for intercourse and ob- 
servation have been rendered greater by the confidence 
with which we have always been treated by the Italian 
chiefs with whom we came in contact, by the spirit of 
hospitality and comradeship in which we have been 
received by thousands of Italian officers in the scores 
of different divisions that we have served, and by the 
popularity of our service among the peasant soldiers in 
the ranks. 

Of the Italy behind the war zone I have only second- 
hand knowledge. But I have had as good a chance as 
any Englishman to form opinions on the attitude of the 
various types and classes of Italian officer and soldier. 
Such generalizations as I venture to make below are 
accretions left in my mind by thousands of conversa- 
tions and incidents, things seen and words overheard 
over a period of three years, in many strange and many 
lovely places, by night and by day, in victory and in 
defeat, in repose and in action, in farms and cities of 



PREFACE. xi 

the great plain, in the narrow Isonzo gorge, in the 
streets of Caporetto and Gorizia, on the barren Bain- 
sizza and the fir woods of the Akipiano, and beneath 
the gigantic precipices of Pasubio. 

As an historian no longer under the delusions of 
youth, I am well aware that generalizations are invariably 
insufficient, and that one individual's judgments and one 
individual's testimony can never be more than a small 
part of the truth on any big subject. But it is the sum 
of individual impressions of witnesses out of which the 
historian in the fullness of time must compose his 
mosaic. And meanwhile one of the dangers of the 
hour in which we live is the mutual ignorance of the 
English-speaking and Italian peoples. So I add my 
mite, without self-deception as to its value, to the not 
very large stock of English literature on Italy's part in 
the war. 

I am deeply indebted to the Italian army for kind- 
ness and courtesy as free and common as the envelop- 
ing air, and to individual members of the army for 
valued friendships. This book cannot be a repayment 
of those debts, but it can at least be an acknowledgment. 

Zona di Guerra, 
October 1918. 



CONTENTS 

I. The Days of May i 

II. Rome in June and July 1915 — Patriotic and unpatriotic 
propaganda — Army chaplains — Italian views of Eng- 
land — The Garibaldi family — Our Unit comes out . 23 

III. The Isonzo front, 1915-1916 — Monte Sabotino — llie 

Quisca road — The bad winter — Battle and cholera — 
The King — Mountain roads and road-making — The 
genio — Fiats and mules ...... 44 

IV. The Isonzo front, 1916 — Plava bottom — The Carso gas- 

attack — Alpini, Bersaglieri, Arditi, Granatieri — The 
taking of Gorizia, August 191 6 71 

V. Villa Trento Field Hospital — Gorizia during the occupa- 
tion — The Carso . . , . . . .103 

VI. The great Italian offensives from Plava and Gorizia, 
May and August-September 191 7 — Kuk, Santo, Bain- 
sizza, San Gabriele — The Italian high- water mark 
reached . . . . . . . . .126 

VII. Caporetto and the Retreat, October 191 7 . . . 163 

VIII. The Rally, November-December 191 7 — High Alpine 

warfare, 19 18 — The June battle on the Piave . . 189 

Epilogue. The Final Victory 216 

List of Italian Losses in the War 235 

13 



LIST OF MAPS 



I. The Zone of War 



II. General Map of the Eastern Frontier .... 46 

III. The Isonzo Front, June 19 15 to August 19 16 . . 48 

IV. Austrian Offensive in the Trentino, May-June 19 16 . 78 

V. The Offensive of August 191 6 92 

VI. The Capture of Gorizia, August 19 16; Carso Positions 

after August 1916 . . . . . . -97 

VII. The Offensive from Plava, May 191 7 . \ . .130 
VIII. The Taking of the Bainsizza Plateau, August-September 

1917 141 

IX. Battle of San Gabriele, August-September 191 7 . . 154 

X. The Austro-German Break-through at Caporetto, October 

24-25, 1917 .... . . 176-7 

XI. Stages of Enemy Advance after Caporetto, and Piave 

Battles of 1918 178-9 

XII. Approximate Line of Italian and Allied Defence, 1918 198-9 



44-5 



SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 
CHAPTER I. 

THE DAYS OF MAY. 

I__f IGH above Rome the statue of Garibaldi lifts itself 
far seen against the skyline ; his head is turned a 
little down and aside, as if he were listening for the 
news of the battle for liberty coming in from all quarters 
of the world in arms to that station on the Janiculum. 
In December 1870 he began this battle of ours against 
Prussian militarism, perceiving that as soon as Napoleon 
III. had fallen it had become a battle not only of Repub- 
lican France but of all free nations against the enslaver. 
The world laughed at the incorrigible old man, setting 
out in his dotage to fight once more against an invincible 
foe in the depth of the French winter. They said he 
had more heart than brains. So he had ; yet his in- 
stinct was right in this matter, and the wise world was 

(2,041) 1 I 



2 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

wrong, as it has now found to its cost. Out of the 
heart of the simple is sometimes ordained wisdom. 

Forty-four years passed before the wise world found 
itself landed precisely where Garibaldi had foreseen, 
fighting for its lost liberties against Prussian despotism. 
Meanwhile much had been happening in Italy. Her 
Parliamentary Constitution, founded by Cavour on the 
English model, stood just as he had made it, but had 
not been used as he would have used it. It had given 
the new Italy a stable government that some older 
nations might envy, preventing reaction- and revolution. 
But it lacked the breath of vital air ; for the Italians, 
though a Liberal, are not a Parliamentary people. To 
them a general election is a formality, not, as in Eng- 
land, a creative convulsion. There had been too little 
real reform, and above all education had been too much 
neglected. 

For the rest, Italy had grown richer, especially in 
the .north ; but her prosperity had been partly caused 
and wholly coloured by an increase of German influ- 
ence, financial and commercial, rapidly becoming politi- 
cal and spiritual. Not only did business men go to 
German banks for credit to start new enterprises, but at 
the universities too many worshipped the well-advertised 
intellectual methods of the Fatherland. Italian thought 



THE DAYS OF MAY. 3 

began to run on lines of Realpolitik. Italian materialism 
found a philosophy ready-made for its needs in modern 
Germany, and mocked at Italian idealism as the super- 
stition of an age gone by. The Triple Alliance, de- 
manding an appearance of respect for Austria, caused 
officialdom to discourage the Risorgimento memories, in 
which mainly Italian idealism finds the body for its 
soul. In Italy officialdom can do much — but not all. 

Fortunately, as was implicit in the nature of the case, 
only the jackals of intellect were thus denationalized. 
The great men — Benedetto Croce, D'Annunzio, Fogaz- 
zaro, Ferrero, Marconi — were Italians yet. But jackals 
are a numerous pack, and can devour. The Spaniard- 
ized black jackals destroyed Italy's soul in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, in spite of Michael Angelo, 
Bruno, and Galileo. Why should not the Germanized 
jackals have done the same in the twentieth century ? 
The danger was great, for no one but the methodic Ger- 
man bagman gave a thought to Italy's material needs. 
The Inglesi were playing cricket or trading across the 
ocean ; they had ceased to know Latin and Greek, but 
had not learnt modern languages instead. The Ameri- 
cani were far away, turning out standardized goods at 
record paces for their own market ; in all things Europe 
must come to America, not America to Europe. So 



4 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

the Kultur disease crept on unchecked, and who knows 
how it would have ended for Italy and many other 
lands if Germany had not, in the high folly of her 
rulers, called in the cannon to give her at once what 
would have been hers for waiting ? 

In the August of all men's fate, Italy heard the 
blast of the trumpets from across the Al{)s. That an- 
cient sound awoke immortal memories. Half-conscious, 
deep-slumbering instincts stirred. Trumpets had been 
heard in Italy of old ; but it was not to found a German 
Empire over the known world that Scipio and Caesar 
had led forth the legions, or the Carroccio stood fast 
amid the spears at Milan. The majestic march up the 
Sacred Way of Trajan's Column was challenged in its 
historic supremacy over the slowly-passing ages by the 
trumpets of this upstart Goth. Should Rome fight to 
make Alaric master of the world ? — 

" O patria mia, vedo le mura e gli archi 
E le colonne e i simulacri, e Ferme 
Torri degli avi nostri." 

Those honoured stones cried out against such treason. 
And then, too, there were nearer and dearer thoughts. 
Shall we fight against our fathers, marching to war under 
the accursed yellow and black ? Was it for this that 
Cavour made us a nation ? Was it to swell the pride of 



THE DAYS OF MAY. 5 

Austria and to add new nations to her slave-roll that 
the plumes of Victor Emmanuel's Bersaglieri went nod- 
ding into the battle smoke at Solferino ? In many 
homes the old men who remember still sit at the head 
of the table, or were but lately borne over the threshold. 
Austria ! Oh, they should have kept their foolish 
trumpets silent, and gone on with their Credit Banks 
and Kultur for yet another generation of men, till Maz- 
zini and Garibaldi were forgotten, and till at least the 
oral tradition of the Risorgimento had perished out of 
the land. 

So in that week of great and sudden decisions, taken 
by all men in every land, Italy unanimously and by 
acclamation declared her neutrality ; she refused to 
interpret the Triple Alliance as compelling her to march 
to the aid of German and Austrian aggression. So far 
Giolitti was at one with Salandra and Sonnino. This 
first great decision, being made so swiftly and with such 
clear popular approval, saved France on the Marne by 
allowing her to strip her Alpine frontier. 

The Triple Alliance disappeared by the act of its 
just interpretation, and left no speck of dishonour on 
Italian statecraft. It was shown that the Triple Alli- 
ance, formed for peace and self-defence, had in its latter 
days been wrested into an instrument of Pan- German 



6 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

ambition. Neither of the Teuton Powers cared what 
their Latin partner thought ; they had not allowed 
Italy to attack the Dardanelles when she was at war 
with Turkey in 191 1, but they themselves had attacked 
Serbia, and plunged all Europe into war, without con- 
sulting the Lepidus of the triumvirate. It is this aspect 
of the Alliance that Salandra so well exposed, and against 
which he led the rebellion. 

In the Italian pamphlet controversies of 19 14-15 the 
following sentence from the useful Bernhardi was often 
quoted by indignant patriots : — 

" The old idea of the German Empire was revived in a federal 
shape by the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy. The 
German idea, as Bismarck fancied it, ruled from the North Sea to 
the Adriatic and the Mediterranean." 

So then, said the Italians, our country is a part of the 
political system of Germany ! Vedremo. 

And here, again, is a characteristic anti- German argu- 
ment of that period of the controversy : — 

" The Triple Alliance did not contemplate but excluded the 
case of a war undertaken by one of the Allied States in order to 
establish its own political hegemony over aU Europe, including its 
own Allies ! It is a problem created by this European war, in 
whose origin we have no -part, now forced upon every State in Europe 
whose nationality is still incomplete, and whose political independence 
is menaced. Italy is one of these States." 



THE DAYS OF MAY. 7 

In that pregnant sentence we see the transition from 
the argument for neutrality in 19 14 to the argument for 
war against the Central Powers in 191 5. Italy s nation- 
ality is incomplete, and her political independence is threat- 
ened. Therefore she must join in the common war 
against the Power whose victory would destroy her 
independence, and who has long been sapping by 
peaceful penetration the foundations of her " incomplete 
nationality." 

And so we get back to the Credit Banks, and Kultur 
at the universities, signs of an " incomplete nationality." 
There were other signs besides : the latent provincial feel- 
ing underneath all the feasts of the tricolour ; the lack of 
intelligent enthusiasm for Italy as a nation among the 
ill-educated peasants in many districts ; the possibility 
of such incidents as one that I heard of as occurring 
on September 20, 1917, just before Caporetto, when a 
girl was insulted in the street for wearing the national 
colours ; the ridiculous belief, still sedulously fostered 
by the German agents, that Italy could never stand alone, 
but must " belong " either to the Germans or else to 
the English — ^all these were the signs of a racial want 
of self-confidence, of an '* incomplete nationality." 

To eradicate this weakness, officialdom and State 
education during the generation of the Triple Alliance 



8 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

had done but little, Socialism nothing, and the Church 
less. 

Such was the disease, such the danger — sure to be 
fatal if Germany won the war, whether Italy remained 
neutral or participated in the attack on France. And, 
therefore, the idealists of the Peninsula, almost without 
an exception, became the war party, seeing in war against 
the Central Powers the only way to save their country's 
independence, their country's traditions, their country's 
«)ul. During three years of constant intimacy with 
Italian soldiers, my experience has been that in the 
army men were enthusiastic for the war almost in pro- 
portion as they were high-minded, so long as the war 
was still a doubtful venture. After victory materialists 
and self-seekers naturally change their tune, and often 
become the loudest Jingoes. 

The War Party (the " Interventionists," as they 
were still called even two years after the war had begun) 
was the party of idealism, of democratic and free govern- 
ment, and of national unity — ^three principles which in 
Italy are bound together because they were the three 
principles of the Risorgimento movement that made the 
State. The Neutralist Party, or " Defeatists," corre- 
spondingly contained the materialists, who could at first 
show a good case in favour of German vassalage as the 



THE DAYS OF MAY. 9 

method of prosperity ; the poUtical and clerical reac- 
tionaries, still at heart opposed to the Revolution of 
1860-70 ; and the provincialists, who are less heartily 
sensible of national unity than of local prejudices and 
interests. 

On these lines the great argument was debated for 
nine months in every household and in every bosom. 
The agitation for war began in August 19 14, and went 
on with increasing volume and fervour till it achieved 
its end on May 24, 191 5 ; while the counter-movement 
for maintaining neutrality, headed by Giolitti, the most 
accomplished and influential politician in the land, 
worked in close touch with the powerful German in- 
terests and personalities by which so many strategic 
points in commerce and society were occupied. The 
avowed German connection of the Neutralists was their 
strength, and also, as the event proved, their weakness. 

The issue of this great political conflict was largely 
determined by the character of the war that the Italians 
were watching. The brutality of the Germans alienated 
the humane Italian nature, and the appalling prospect of 
the " Unni " as masters of the world had as much effect 
in Italy as it had in humanitarian and former pacifist 
circles in England. The treatment of the Belgians gave 
a turn to popular sympathy from the first. The sink- 



lo SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

ing of the Liisitania gravely affected the final crisis in 
May 1915. 

Deliberate cruelty is alien to the nature of the Italian. 
When he is cruel it is through laziness or want of imagi- 
nation, never from pleasure in inflicting pain. I have 
seen scores of thousands of Austrian prisoners brought 
in straight from the lines, and I have never seen them 
insulted, assaulted, or ill-used.* The deliberate cruelty 
of the drilled German, his insufferable insolence to the 
conquered Belgians and French, was odious • to the 
Italian as a strange and alien vice. 

Above all, the Italian is fond of children. His 
family affections are very strong ; his children are never 
beaten, and the mistake rather is that they are too often 
petted and spoilt. The kind of neglect from which they 
often suffer is thoughtless neglect, combined with much 
affection. Italians say they cannot understand why we 
have a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 
because they cannot imagine any one being deliberately 
cruel to a child. When, therefore, the Lusitania was 



* I believe that in some cases, though I did not see any such my- 
self, prisoners taken in October-November 19 18 were insulted owing 
to the just and natural anger aroused in the Italian soldiers on that 
occasion by the tales of the outrages endured by the populations of 
Venetia and Friuli at the hands of the Austro-Hungarians during their 
year's servitude after Caporetto. But even under that provocation 
there were no outrages on prisoners. 



THE DAYS OF MAY. ii 

sunk, the effect in Italy was great, and the consequences 
were immediate, ahhough it was not Italian children 
who had been drowned. 

This nine months' controversy on the issue of neu- 
trality or war was memorable, not only because of the 
obvious consequences involved, but because it was a 
contest between two conceptions of the life of man and 
of nations — a. moral and spiritual against a non-moral 
and material. The victory of the lower principle would 
have been decisive for generations to come in Italy, 
and probably also in the world at large, seeing that 
even with Italy's intervention the Allies have only just 
been able to hold the fort till the arrival of the Americans. 

This struggle between a frankly idealist and a frankly 
materialist view of human affairs was not the outcome 
of mere passing political circumstances, but of a native 
dualism in the Italian character and philosophy. Some 
people regard the Italians as sentimental idealists, mak- 
ing appeal only too often to lofty motives as the basis of 
daily actions.* Others condemn them as materialists. 
Neither view covers the whole Italian character. Mate- 
rialism and idealism are found side by side in much 
sharper contrast than in England, where we would fain 

* For example, Italian military and civil proclamations and official 
documents generally. 



12 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

conceal from ourselves the baseness of our worse motives, 
and from others the idealism of our best. Foggy like his 
climate, the Englishman about to act makes an indis- 
tinguishable blur of ideal and material motives for action, 
which often about represents the case. The Italian, on 
the other hand, carries the hard, ciiear outlines of the 
atmosphere and landscape of his own native land into 
his conduct and philosophy. He knows, or thinks, that 
he is guided in an action either by grovelling self-interest 
or by lofty ideals, and he makes no ploy about saying 
the one or the other. 

There are, therefore, some Italians who are material- 
ists pur sang : lago's frank philosophy is theirs, though 
seldom his vindictiveness. Some, again, are always 
idealists : Saint Francis, Mazzini, and Garibaldi are 
typical Italians, though above the level, just as Shake- 
speare and Lincoln are typical Anglo-Saxons. 

But most Italians are materialists one day and idealists 
the next. Hence their mercurial character. Hence the 
changing moods of their army — San Gabriele and the 
Bainsizza one month, Caporetto the next. Grappa and 
the Piave the month after. Italian politics and war, 
closely intervolved in one another during the last four 
years, cannot be understood by foreigners unless they 
grasp this dual element in the Italian psychology. There 



THE DAYS OF MAY. 13 

has been a complicated and unceasing struggle between 
the good and bad, the strength and weakness of Italy 
herself going on all through the war. The first deci- 
sive success of the good was won in " the days of 
May " 1915. 

During this nine months' agitation, known as the 
" period of neutrality," the Ministers Salandra and Son- 
nino, with the help of General Cadoma, and with the full 
approval of the King, were quietly but vigorously pre- 
paring the army for war. Like all the peaceable nations, 
Italy in August 19 14 had been surprised in a state of 
unpreparedness, and could hardly then have taken the 
field at all for lack of material. As the spring of 191 5 
drew on, the worst defects had been remedied, the great 
Russian retreats were beginning, and the time for inter- 
vention was clearly at hand if it was not to be too late. 
But the actual form of the decisive crisis was dictated, 
not by the Interventionist Government, but by the action 
of the Neutralist Opposition. 

It had long been said, and was still generally believed, 
that Giolitti, though sometimes out of office, could al- 
ways return to it when he wished, so powerful was his 
manipulation of the permanent majority in the Chamber. 
It was expected, not by his supporters alone, that at the 



14 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

ripe moment to prevent war he would replace Salandra 
and Sonnino, whom he had put in as caretakers, and 
who had forgotten their terms of tenure. It was thought 
that against his will they could no more stay in office 
than the first Pitt when he tried to govern without the 
Duke of Newcastle. And if the question had been left 
by the people to their elected representatives, such 
undoubtedly would have been the event. For the 
Italian elections represented the indifference, the caution, 
the local and material interests of the race, not their soul, 
or their higher conception of themselves as Italia. In 
moments of great crisis that higher conception, the poet- 
ized, almost religious anthropomorphic vision of the sad, 
crowned lady, mother of heroes and martyrs, would carry 
away a people who are only materialists part of the time.* 
But it would be the people inspiring the Parliament, 
not the Parliament the people. 

Giolitti's move was bold and skilful. The man who 

* It has been well observed by Mr. Horatio Brown, in his article 
on Italian Political Idealism in the Quarterly Review of June 1918, 
that the poetical female incarnations of " La France " and " Italia " 
are popular forces, as our female Britannia, with or without bul- 
warks, on the pennies, certainly is not. Perhaps the unbroken 
tradition of Madonna-worship partly accounts for the difierence. 
" John Bull," too, is but a humorous view of ourselves. The 
words that really stir our blood — " England," " Scotland " — the 
words our poets use when they are reaUy moved, do not suggest a 
person at aU, but a ma^s of ideas and emotions which it would be 
murder to dissect. 



THE DAYS OF MAY. 15 

carried it to the verge of success was no vulgar in- 
triguer. And it was, presumably, his conception of how 
best to serve the interests of his fellow-countrymen ; 
no doubt, too, he was a genuine lover of peace. 
Our difference with him is that his conception of 
those interests was not more elevated, and that he 
should have thought peace worth a vassal Europe and 
a vassal Italy. 

His plan was to call in Germany, behind the back 
of the Austrian and Italian Governments, to arrange a 
treaty which Germany should force on Austria and he 
himself on Italy. This plan offered some though not 
large satisfaction to the Irredentists, who were, osten- 
sibly at least, to get Trento but not Trieste — ^the famous 
parecchio, or " something." But even of this " some- 
thing " there was to be no delivery till the war was 
over ! Italy, remembering " scraps of paper," " liked 
not the security." Giolitti's plan had, however, the 
merit that it brought Germany into the limelight as 
the friend and patron of Italy coercing Austria into due 
concessions ; now the country hated Austria, but feared 
to break the strong ties that bound her to Germany 
in seemingly helpless dependence. Indeed, Italy was 
to be at war with Austria more than a year before she 
dared even officially to break those ties by a declaration 



1 6 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

of the greater war ; actually, perhaps, they were only 
broken by Caporetto. 

Giolitti's plan had, therefore, attractions enough to 
ensure success but for another factor which he under- 
estimated — ^the shame felt by all the best Italians, and 
by all the Italians at their best, at the prospect of eternal 
vassalage to Germany which this advantageous bargain 
would certainly involve. And Giolitti's method of carry- 
ing out the plan by treating with the German Ambas- 
sador Billow behind the back of the Italian Government 
was in itself the loudest advertisement of such shame 
and vassalage. It was that which fired the mine of 
popular resentment, and hoisted the most skilful of all 
engineers on his own petard. 

The announcement made in the following paragraph 
in the Messagero newspaper of May 13, 1915, was the 
signal for the outburst : — 

" The Bulow-Giolitti Agreement. — We are in a position to an- 
nounce that the definite Austro-German offer was notified, before 
its presentation to the responsible Ministers, to the Hon. Giolitti 
and his lieutenants, among whom, in the first line, is the Hon. 
Bertolini. So the Cav. Giovanni Giolitti treats, discusses, and 
pledges Italy behind the back of the King and Government. This 
grave news needs no comment." 

In the next paragraph there follows an attack on 
Erzeberger, who came over ostentatiously to influence 



THE DAYS OF MAY. 17 

Italian Catholic opinion against the war. The Italians 
found that foreigners were trying to dictate a policy to 
them, and they rose up in sudden wrath. 

The " days of May " that followed are an ever- 
memorable event in Italian history. Salandra and Son- 
nino were resigning because they knew that Giolitti 
possessed the majority in Parliament, and that that 
majority would vote at his bidding for neutrality. All 
seemed lost, and the advocates of war were for a few 
hours in despair, thinking that Italy would make her 
terms as the vassal of the Teutonic Powers. It was at 
this moment that the people interfered. In Italy the 
people is, when roused, much more formidable than the 
Parliament. In ordinary times Parliament administers 
the country, and divides the spoils of office. But its 
proceedings do not excite the constant and passionate 
interest that parliamentary affairs excite in England. 
The Italians are not a great parUamentary nation, but 
they are a great democratic nation. And in times of 
political crisis like i860 and 19 15 the people were 
endowed with remarkable sense and vigour. At such 
moments, which form the tide in the affairs of men, the 
" Popolo " goes down into the streets and takes things 
into its own hands, supporting Cavour or Garibaldi, 
Salandra and Sonnino, as the occasion may require. 

(2,041) 2 



i8 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

So now, when Giolitti took the negotiations out of 
Salandra's hands, and Salandra, having no parliamentary 
majority,* perforce resigned, the people went down into 
the street in every city of the land and intimated that 
either Giolitti must be gone or there would be a revo- 
lution. These monster demonstrations of the whole 
city population contained all classes — ^the workman, the 
clerk, the tradesman, the public employee. It was a 
union of the same burgher classes as had carried through 
the national deliverance sixty years before. They were 
now completing the work. The peasant would not 
have stirred himself to overthrow Giolitti, any more 
than he would by himself have made the Risorgimento. 
The politics of Italy since the time of Romulus have 
been the politics of her cities. Although the peasants 
form numerically a vast majority in the Peninsula, no 
rural class or organism has ever had the importance 
of the English squires or the American township, or 
even of Jacques Bonhomme in 1789. The cities of 
Italy made the war ; but the peasant has had to fight it. 
That difficulty, more and more felt as the lengthening 
campaign drew out year after year, was not foreseen in 
the ecstasies of May 191 5. 

* Shortly before the crisis, three hundred deputies had left their 
cards on Giolitti — a kind of extra-parliamentary vote of confidence in 
the opposition leader. 



THE DAYS OF MAY. 19 

The army was quietly favourable to war, but took 
no part in the agitation. Soldiers do not dictate to 
Italy ; they serve her. 

It is interesting to remember that during these days 
of May the Italian people had no knowledge of the 
secret Treaty of London and its provisions. 

Those who think of the Italians as a passionate, 
violent, gesticulating " Latin people " over against the 
sober English, ought to compare " the days of May " 
in Rome or Milan with our own anti- German riots in 
London of almost the same date. Even in their rioting 
the Italians preserved sense and dignity. It was rioting 
with a purpose, and achieved that purpose with the 
minimum of injury to property {item^ a few windows), 
and with no injury to life and limb. Hundreds of 
thousands of respectable men of all classes walked slowly 
through the streets of Rome and the other cities of Italy, 
booming out with a slow, ceaseless iteration, " Morte 
a Giolitti ! Morte a Giolitti ! " It was the masterpiece 
of a people whose oldest political tradition, dating from 
before Ciceruacchio, Rienzi, and Appius Claudius, is 
the " politics of the piazza. ^^ * 

Biilow fled back " to the worst side of the Mont St. 
Gothard." Giolitti took train for his country seat in 

* That is, demonstrations in the public square of the city. 



20 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Piedmont. Salandra and Sonnino resumed office. The 
Chamber bowed to the will of the people and decreed 
the war with unanimity and enthusiasm. On May 
24th — ^the " Ventiquattro Maggio " — ^now a date in the 
patriotic calendar along with Venti Settembre— the 
final war of the Risorgimento began. 

It was during this agitation in May that the poet 
D'Annunzio came prominently forward and began to 
surprise those who thought he was a " decadent " — ^a 
view that his conduct in the war has made seem droll 
indeed. His short orations during the crisis were of 
classical perfection for political logic, literary art, and 
imaginative appeal — ^better, in fact, than some of the 
dithyramb ic utterances of his later style. They were 
as effective as Mark Antony's less sincere rhetoric 
in the same city two thousand years ago. They 
caused Giolitti and his friends, like Brutus and Cassius 
of old, " to ride like madmen through the gates of 
Rome." 

One of the most popular sentences in D'Annunzio 's 

orations in the last decisive days of the agitation ran as 

follows : — 

" No, we are not, and we will not be a museum, an inn, a village 
summer resort, a sky painted with Prussian blue for international 
honejmioon couples, a delightful market for buying and selling, 
fraud and barter." 



ft "<M*IJB.H.' I . 



THE DAYS OF MAY. 21 

That sentence aroused a wild enthusiasm, for it touched 
people on the raw place. The omnipresent and ill- 
mannered German tourist had done much to keep 
before people's eyes the impression that Italy had 
ceased to belong to the Italians. 

In a less degree, but somewhat in the same kind 
as the German tourist, the too common type of half- 
cultured English person, who goes through the Penin- 
sula in constant raptures about Giotto, but neither knows 
nor cares anything about the modern Italians except as 
keepers of the painted sepulchre of their remoter ances- 
tors, is an offence to the age we live in and a danger to 
the friendship of Italy and England. The good-natured 
British Tommy, who has the inestimable advantage of 
never having heard of Giotto, who takes all the inhabit- 
ants of the earth as plain human beings like himself, 
has done more for the entente by playing with Italian 
children in the villages and gladdening the hearts of 
their parents with his few broken words of French and 
Italian, than many more educated people who are for 
ever judging other nations by standards made in Eng- 
land. It seems to be given to the simple to understand 
a profound truth that is hidden from superior persons in 
ail lands — ^namely, that it takes all sorts to make a world. 

If the Neutralists had kept clear of the Germans in 



22 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Society and politics, they would have had a much better 
chance of preserving peace. If Biilow and Erzeberger 
had never come ostentatiously across the Alps to teach 
the Italians their own business, the War Party would 
have had a more difficult task. But the German con- 
duct all through the affair went far to prove the main 
thesis of the War Party, that the Germans were dominat- 
ing Italy socially, economically, and politically, and that 
the Kaiser had " cast out his shoe " over the Peninsula. 
Giolitti, long the most popular statesman in the country, 
the established dictator, with Parliaments and Ministers 
in his pocket, ruined himself in a week, because he was 
seen to be bargaining away Italian freedom of action at 
the dictates of a foreign Power. Let it be a warning to 
any other nation and to any foreign journals who are 
tempted to lecture Italy overmuch on what she ought 
or ought not to do. We English are too fond of giving 
advice ; but fortunately we give much less than the 
Germans. It is strange that other people should like 
to manage their own affairs; but they do. And this 
peculiarity is very strong among the Italians. 



CHAPTER II. 

Rome in June and July 19 15 — Patriotic and unpatriotic propaganda — 
Army chaplains — Italian views of England — ^The Garibaldi family 
— Our Unit comes out. 

TN June and July 19 15 I was to and fro between 
London and Rome, helping to arrange for the forma- 
tion in England, and acceptance by the authorities in 
Italy, of a British Red Cross ambulance Unit. I remem- 
ber very well my first business contact with Italian 
officers, so characteristic of the kindness I have received 
from them ever since. I sat, waiting for my first inter- 
view, in one of the antechambers of the War Office, 
gazed down upon somewhat sternly by official oil por- 
traits of Cavour, Ricasoli, and the thirty- eight other 
Ministers of War since 1847. How would their suc- 
cessors regard the inevitable " Englishman with a 
walking stick " coming in to bother them in the middle 
of a bigger business than Solferino or Castelfidardo } 
It was still somewhat of an experiment for a foreigner to 
propose himself for the Italian front in those early weeks 



24 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

of the war, when it was still nostra guerra, not yet fronte 
unico. The forty Ministers, as portrayed by official art, 
looked forbidding enough : there w^as scarcely a twinkle 
even behind Cavour's spectacles, and as to Ricasoli — ! 

But the moment I was ushered across the passage 
into the presence of General Elia, the living Under- 
Secretary for War, how different was the atmosphere ! 
He had in the room with him his friend of the same 
honourable name, Elia of the Thousand, and we talked 
Viva Garibaldi for a few minutes. Then the veteran 
left, and the General fell to business with me with the 
utmost cordiality. 

There was not much doubt about his desire to have 
at the Italian front a representation of England, of the 
kind I outlined to him. These views were subse- 
quently accepted by his chief, General Zupelli, the 
Minister for War, and by General Cadorna, and in a 
short time a written agreement for the acceptance of 
our services was signed between the Italian Government 
and my B.R.C. chiefs. Sir Courtauld Thomson and 
Lord Monson. 

Rome in June and July was very quiet after the 
storms of May. The sober work of modern scientific 
war had begun, and further processions and shouting 



ROME IN JUNE AND JULY. 25 

were felt to be out of place. The authorities were from 
the first anxious to discourage the idea that the methods 
of 1848, or even of i860, were to be revived, though the 
objects and spirit of the new war were the same as the 
old. The soul of " quarantotto " was required, but in 
a new body. No red shirts, by request. 

Besides, with Lemberg and Warsaw falling, the 
outlook was enough to damp all feux de joie. The 
determined band of patriotic men who had run Italy up 
into the battle line had all along been fully aware that 
she was coming to the aid not of the victor but of the 
then weaker side. May God reward them for it ! If 
there were those who had not realized this before, they 
were all sure of it in June. But, fortunately, whatever 
the Russians were doing, the Alpini had carried the 
watershed of the Trentino border, and in Friuli the 
enemy had fallen back on the Isonzo line. So the 
spectre, that had haunted some minds, of a German 
" knock-out blow " in the first weeks was already laid. 

As an old flaneur of Roman streets I noticed certain 
changes in the popular literature exposed for sale. For 
one thing the anti-clerical cartoons had disappeared. 
Since the ordinary Catholic, as distinct from the Vatican 
party, was patriotic, and had found a figurehead in 
General Cadorna himself, a truce had been called to the 



26 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

more inelegant pastimes of the mangia preti. On the 
other hand, the clerical cartoonists had taken the field 
with carpings at the national undertaking curiously 
similar to those of the official Socialists, and with a 
frank pro- Germanism. I remember one such picture 
representing the noble figure of Germania regretfully 
shaking the hand of Italia in temporary leave-taking, and 
saying, " It's that old fool there (Austria) who has made 
us quarrel." 

The attitude of the Church and of Socialism to the 
war differed in Italy according to times, places, and 
persons. It is notorious that in neither institution did 
the official chiefs carry the whole of the faithful with 
them into " neutrality." But it is, I fear, equally 
notorious that in many villages the priest, and in many 
towns and some regiments the Socialists, did much 
disintegrating propaganda. 

On a theme so large and confused as the attitude of 
the Church to the war I prefer to confine myself to 
personal experience, which in the army has been uni- 
formly pleasant. The army chaplains were carefully 
chosen, and — so far as my experience goes, and I have 
known many of them — ^were invariably patriotic. The 
discipline under which they had been brought up made 
them adaptable to military duties and conditions, and 



ROME IN JUNE AND JULY. 27 

the habit of busying themselves on behalf of others made 
them peculiarly active in looking after the material needs 
of the soldiers, at least in the Sanitk service, w^here I 
saw most of them. Standing good-humouredly a deal 
of chaff on the basis of the " Ingoldsby Legends " view 
of the Church, whenever the light camouflage of Italian 
mess talk flagged for want of a less threadbare theme, 
but popular with their brother officers in spite of their 
profession, their position with the private soldiers, 
wounded and unwounded, seemed to me due to their 
work and qualities and not to superstitious awe. Gallant 
and humble soldiers of Christ and of Italy, in the com- 
mon grey-green uniform, but with the large red cross 
on the breast, many of them by their simple daily acts 
made the outworn quarrel of Church and State seem 
a paltry and unnatural anachronism. If they had the 
ordering of the matter it would not last a day. 

My belief is that the Church did little direct harm 
to the patriotic cause in the army itself, but much in the 
country behind. The same cannot be said of the anti- 
war politicians. It is possible to select the chaplain for 
a regiment, but not its Socialists. 

But I am wandering far from Rome in the summer 
of 191 5. A change that then struck me in the literature 
of the streets was the great increase of historical appeals 



28 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

to the Risorgimento. The leading Roman cinema showed 
us the story of Ciceruacchio and the Rome of 1849. 
Old proclamations of that epoch were reprinted and 
posted up on the walls. The cartoons represented the 
Austrians always in the uniform of that bygone period, 
with shako and jackboot complete. The appeal in the 
newspapers and in conversation was constantly to these 
memories. 

One evening I went to a revue in the form of a fable 
of animals. The old dying wolf was Austria, and the 
bellicose mastiff Germany. The black and yellow wolf, 
more horrible for being now half fangless, hobbling on 
a crutch shaped like a gallows, was in itself an artistic 
creation. We had on the stage Cavour, Rossini, and I 
know not whom beside. The appeal was to historic 
memories — ^what " our fathers have told us " — ^and it 
moved a vast audience far more than anything which 
had happened as long as sixty years ago would move 
a theatre of Englishmen. Austria was paying now for 
what she did to Italy between 181 5 and 1866, and for 
still retaining and oppressing Italian-speaking lands. 

Another night I went to another revue of the war and 
of the Italian politics that led up to it. There was an 
Aristophanic political licence, Giolitti and Biilow being 
as important dramatis persona as Cleon before them. 



ITALIAN VIEWS OF ENGLAND. 29 

Such uncensored freedom would, one fears, have been 
sadly vulgarized on the British stage, but here it was 
used delightfully. There was true delicacy of wit in the 
scene where Biilow unrolls to Giolitti and his parlia- 
mentary majority an enormous scroll, containing on 
one corner of it a list of the infinitesimal '' concessions " 
that he will make on Austria's behalf. Some one sug- 
gests that they might ask the Italian Government about 
it. " There is no government," says Giolitti. Then 
the mob breaks in on the conspirators, who vanish. 
The scene ends with Giolitti looking round the room 
behind all the chairs with a match to find his " majority," 
but it is nowhere to be found. 

As the British Ambassador was known to be present 
— it was a benefit night for the Blue Cross — a tableau 
had been specially put in about the British navy. A 
symbolic British naval ojfficer, looking, I fear, more like 
a representative of the Chilian navy, read a spirited 
speech about England having drawn the sword for 
honour and Belgium. Then we all got up and clapped 
for the British Ambassador to the strains of " God save 
the King." A little later, when an " Old Garibaldino " 
on the stage was singing his song, the presence of Ric- 
ciotti Garibaldi was detected in one of the boxes, and 
we all got up and clapped for him to the strains of 



30 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Garibaldi's Hymn. Thereupon Ricciotti made us a 
speech from his box, mentioning his father's love for 
England, and telling how his own horse was wounded in 
the campaign of 1866 in Trentino, and how it gave a 
shriek of pain that he would never forget, and how we 
should all subscribe to the Blue Cross for animals in war. 

Both in Rome that summer, and in all Italy inside 
and outside the war zone from 1915 to 1918, the touch- 
stone of enthusiasm for the war has been friendliness to 
England, and the touchstone of indifference or aversion 
to the war has been Anglophobia. England, more or 
less unconscious of the matter herself, has been a party 
cry, for and against, in Italy for the last four years. 
During the decade before the war the Germans, in far 
closer touch with the Italians than we, could never get 
themselves liked, but did their best to get us disliked. 
Through a thousand subterraneous channels they had 
long been disseminating strange stories about us. And 
an important part of the work of the German agents 
during the war has been to foster that legend. How 
often and in what strange forms we kept coming up 
against the great anti-English myth let the following 
story illustrate. 

In the spring of 191 6 I was walking one day in the 
chestnut woods of the deep valley dividing Monte Sabo- 



ITALIAN VIEWS OF ENGLAND. 31 

tino from the village of Quisca, where we were quartered, 
when I came across an Italian sergeant, and we passed 
the time of day. A more simple and kindly soul it 
would be impossible to find in any land. We talked 
of the war. " You English are keeping it on," he said. 
I suggested the Austrians, waving a hand towards them 
on Sabotino above us. " No," he said ; "it is between 
you English and Germans. You English want to close 
the sea to all others." " How so ? " I asked. " For 
example," he replied, " you make the ships of all other 
nations pay you tribute when they pass through the 
Straits of Gibraltar." After ten minutes' effort on my 
part to disabuse his mind, we parted the best of friends 
— ^for he was one of the most lovable of men ; but I am 
convinced he thought I was sent out to lie for my 
country, though he had far too much native courtesy 
to say so. Who had been at the pains, and why, to 
teach this simple and kindly ally of ours this extravagant 
myth about Gibraltar ? And what efforts had we made 
to undeceive him and a million such as he ? 

But it would be as much a mistake to exaggerate the 
success of this propaganda as it would be to ignore its 
existence. The memory of the old friendship for Eng- 
land as the first and most disinterested champion of 
Italy a nation was a most potent factor. Italians often 



32 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

spoke to me of it, and with deep sincerity. We had 
not yet done reaping the harvest of gratitude sown for 
us by Lord John Russell and Mr. Gladstone. Then, 
too, the belief in England as a " serious " nation that 
could endure to the end and " win the last battle " 
nourished, as I know, the hopes of many of Italy's 
patriot soldiers through long months and years of gloom 
now passed away. Because we were Englishmen, we 
were received by the Italian officers at the front in the 
spirit of conrradeship, soon ripening into friendship 
when they found we reciprocated their feelings. And 
I believe that very many of the peasant soldiers — my 
friend the sergeant, for example — liked us the better 
for being English, in spite of the views that had been 
successfully pumped into them by German agents. 
There are so many pigeon-holes in every human brain, 
and the oddest incompatibles can be found docketed 
there together. That is one main reason why generaliza- 
tions about popular opinion, though necessary as aids 
to thought, are so often misleading as guides to action. 

In those early days a special difficulty existed. I 
became aware first in Rome that Italy did not believe 
that England was pulling her full weight. This idea 
was the natural result of the diatribes which we were 
then directing against ourselves for slackness, particu- 



THE GARIBALDI FAMILY. 33 

larly in those British newspapers which enjoyed almost 
a monopoly of Italian circulation. These diatribes, long 
since discontinued, were held to be necessary at that 
time as part of an internal campaign for greater effi- 
ciency. But it was unfortunate that our mutual ex- 
hortations within our own doors could not fail to be 
overheard by our Allies without. Having little or no 
instruction as to what England's effort really amounted 
to, the Italians took what our own newspapers said as 
being, not only the truth, but the whole truth. Such 
self-exposure is so alien to their own customs that 
they could not be expected to interpret it aright. So 
long as our army was on the defensive and nursing its 
mighty strength, it was the German game in Italy to 
whisper that we were fine " sailors," with an implied 
full stop there. This misunderstanding came to an end 
with the Somme offensive of July 191 6. 

I said that a motto of the Italian War Office was, 
*' No red shirts, by request." But the Garibaldi tradi- 
tion and the Garibaldi family have played, in more senses 
than one, an important part in Italy's war. 

His is a memory that cannot be vulgarized by an 
amount of appeal which would stultify any other figure. 
With a people who require to be keyed up to a state 

(2,041) 3 



34 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

of idealistic enthusiasm before they can give their best, 
that tradition has first and last been worth more than a 
dozen army corps. A nation must have something to 
remember ; that was what was wrong with the Russians, 
so naturally courageous and enduring, but with only 
their long annals of serfdom behind. 

All Garibaldi's six grandsons came together from 
the ends of the earth to fight for France in 19 14. It 
was a fact that spoke in the agitation for war during the 
period of Italy's neutrality. Two out of the six were 
killed before their own country entered the conflict. 

I knew Bruno Garibaldi well. I met him first at the 
Garibaldi celebrations at Sutherland House in 1907, a 
boy fresh from an English school, simple and sedate in 
manner and in thought, craving only for an outdoor 
career, and asking little else of life, as his grandfather 
and his grandmother Anita would have done had they 
not lived in an age when Italy called to be delivered. 
For a week we walked the Westmorland hills together, 
chiefly in the mist, as is the custom there. Then he 
went across the ocean, and I never saw him more. I 
remember with what strange feelings I read his name 
on a street in Udine that had been called after him ; 
he had changed suddenly from the boy I walked with 
eight years before, to a hero gone before the armies, a 



OUR UNIT COMES OUT. 35 

memory to his race for ever. Who would wish it other- 
wise ? Not he, I am sure. For I know that his deepest 
feeling, though he talked little about it, was to be not 
unworthy of the name he bore. 

The success of the surviving brothers in the Italian 
army after 191 5, especially of the eldest, General Pep- 
pino Garibaldi, is well known to all the world. Seldom 
has a family tradition, so hard to maintain aright in 
altered circumstances, been upheld with more dignity 
and spirit combined. 

Alike in the times of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and 
Milton, of Horace Walpole, of Byron and of Ruskin, 
there was constant traffic between England and Italy 
in the finest goods of civilization, and, since the days 
of Mazzini and Cavour, in what we may call the finest 
goods of politics. The existence of this common 
ground has never ceased to be recognized, and of late 
years the historians of our literature and civilization 
have brought into ever greater prominence the ancient 
debts of England to Italy. But there has recently been 
less personal contact between the two countries, since 
the dying out of the generation of the English friends 
of the Italian patriots, of Russell and Gladstone, of 
Browning and Swinburne, and since the elite of Italy 



36 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

are no longer constrained to live in exile in England. 
At the same time there has been a diminution of mutual 
business connections relatively to those formed with 
other countries. The affection of Englishmen for Italy 
has not, indeed, diminished ; and it has always been 
something more than abstract, because it is rather felt 
than thought. But it had in our day become less per- 
sonal than in the Victorian era. 

The ease with which modern travellers are wafted 
and ushered through a foreign country, seeing its sights 
but missing its inhabitants, has encouraged the English- 
man's natural aloofness with strangers and slowness 
with strange tongues. Our ignorance of Continental 
Europe had reached its zenith at the moment when we 
found ourselves protagonists in the greatest European 
war of all times. We had for a generation been turning 
more and more, in commerce, in politics, and in all else, 
to the worlds beyond the ocean, or back into our own 
home problems, in any case away from our neighbours 
in Europe — till we were suddenly reminded very forcibly 
that they were still our neighbours, brought nearer, 
indeed, than ever, some as our foes, some, fortunately, 
still our friends. All through the war we have been 
paying with our life-blood for our long insulation from 
an Italy and a Europe where the Germans, though more 



OUR UNIT COMES OUT. 37 

personally disliked than we, were much more closely 
connected and much better informed. Englishmen and 
Italians can never again afford to drift so far asunder 
as they have done, not from want of friendliness, but 
from sheer negligence. 

From this point of view the experience of the British 
Red Cross in Italy since September 191 5 is not with- 
out interest, as proof of the natural sympathy of Italians 
and Englishmen, and the ease with which they co-operate 
in work and form ties of acquaintance and friendship, 
when a little time and trouble are devoted to the study 
of the Italian language, and when an effort to break 
down dividing barriers is made by the Englishman as 
part of the day's duty. 

The strong diversities of character, manner, and per- 
sonality common among the inhabitants of the British 
islands are interesting and attractive to the Italian, when- 
ever relations are sufficiently close and continuous for the 
various tipi inglesi to be understood and valued. It is, 
indeed, a familiar truth, never to be sufficiently impressed 
on the Englishman abroad, that curt manners and neglect 
of formal courtesy produce a much worse impression in 
Italy than at home. But cold and dull manners are also 
resented, and it was not the most colourless or formally 
correct of our number who were the most popular with 



38 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

our Allies. The thing that has most struck me in 
three years of watching Englishmen and Italians to- 
gether is the quick reply of the Italian nature to what 
is best and most characteristic in the English nature, 
if an effort is made to show it in some palpable form. 

Our personal experience in Italy affords, I think, proof 
that the contact of England and Italy might be much 
closer than it is, if only more of our people would set 
about it in the right spirit, and take the requisite pains 
to get into personal touch. For these results have been 
obtained by men who, in nine cases out of ten, spoke 
no Italian when they first joined us, and had not many 
of them been in Italy even as tourists. 

The First British Red Cross Unit in Italy, which 
I had the honour to command, was financed and 
administered in London by the British Committee in 
aid of Italian Wounded, of which Mr. E. H. Gilpin 
is chairman, with the funds subscribed by the public 
specially for this purpose, to give practical proof of 
sympathy with Italy. But the Unit served under 
the British Red Cross, as the First Italian Unit of 
that Society, which gave our personnel its status, and, 
moreover, supplied us with half our ambulances. From 
the original negotiations in the summer of 19 15 onwards, 
Sir Arthur Stanley always showed an imaginative and 



OUR UNIT COMES OUT. 39 

sympathetic grasp of the importance of the B.R.C. being 
represented in the Italian war, in days when the doctrine 
of the f route unico was all too little understood. At 
first our Unit was the humble sole representative of that 
vital idea at the Italian front, the only Allied uniforms 
to be seen among the grigio-verde * Lord Monson, 
the B.R.C. Commissioner, pleased with our reception by 
the Italians, soon afterwards brought out the Second 
and Third Ambulance Units, and gradually all the 
various activities of the Croce Rossa Britannica grew up. 
The preliminaries for acceptance on the Italian front 
having been arranged in Rome in July 191 5, I returned 
to England for August, when our Unit was enrolled and 
organized in a camp formed in Sir George Young's 
grounds at Formosa, on the Thames ; his son Geoifrey, 
the poet and Alpine climber, already distinguished for 
hi^ work in Flanders, was coming with us as officer 
of out-stations. In the formation and preparation 
of the Unit we owed most to the energy and experi- 
ence of Mr. P. J. Baker, the well-known Cambridge 
athlete, who had in 19 14 formed the Friends' Ambu- 
lance Unit, and served with it in Ypres during the first 
and second battles. Several ex- members of that Unit 
joined us, and proved an invaluable element. 

* " Grey-green " Italian uniform. 



4© SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

But the larger number of us were not Friends or 
Conscientious Objectors.* Many of our original drivers 
gradually found their way into the Flying Service or 
the army, and many others were incapacitated by age or 
physical debility. Our personnel has changed almost 
twice over since 191 5, latterly taking on an excellent Colo- 
nial element. But the tradition and the officers have been 
little changed in three years. As the war went on, par- 
ticularly after the passage of the Service Act, it became 
very difficult to retain sufficient men fit to endure the 
strain of driving days and nights on end under fire in time 
of battle, and even in ordinary times of driving without 
lights on crowded or shell-broken mountain roads. But 
when it was seen that we were doing good work, ap- 
preciated by the Italians, at the request of Sir Rennell 
Rodd and the Foreign Office the recruiting authorities 
at home treated us with consideration, and finally Lord 
Milner for the War Office requested us to continue the 
work to the end. 

But I am getting ahead of August 191 5. When we 
were nearly ready to be shipped, I rang up a friend at 



* Since it has been erroneously stated in public that I am a Con- 
scientious Objector, I take this opportunity of stating that I am not. 
Owing to my age and medical unfitness (Class C II. in 1916 and E in 
1918), I thought I should see more of the front in the B.R.C. in Italy 
than in the rear of the British army 



OUR UNIT COMES OUT. 41 

the Admiralty, stated our case, and asked if our twenty- 
six cars could get a lift across to Havre. He left me 
at the telephone while he went to consult his chiefs, 
returning in a few minutes with the answer that on 
August 22nd a ship would take the cars across from 
Southampton. And so it turned out in fact ! I re- 
member the impression this promptitude and efficiency 
made on me. They must tie up their bundles with 
blue tape in the Admiralty ! The war was going badly 
on land in these days, but, thought I, if the navy and 
maritime transport is managed like that, our side will 
win yet. And now the four years' pressure of those 
mighty arms has done its work upon the foe, and we 
have heard the iron ribs cracking one by one. 

We left Formosa on August 21st, shipped from 
Southampton next day, left Havre on the afternoon of 
the 23rd, drove thence in convoy across France, and 
arrived at Modane on the appointed evening of August 
29th, with all our twenty-six cars up to time. A 
week of perfect weather had been granted us. Night 
after night we bivouacked under the stars in the pleasant 
land of France, under the walls of some remote chateau 
long forgotten of men, or in the hollow of some wooded 
hillside. South of Chartres we began to traverse dis- 
tricts that had seen no Allied uniform or any sign of 



42 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

the war to which their sons had gone. More and more, 
as we got deeper into the Southern hills, the passage of 
" Les Anglais " aroused the dreamy old villages, and 
the stragglers of our convoy were waylaid by crowds 
that had collected with flowers and kindly greetings. 

At Modane we were made welcome by Italian officers 
sent to meet us, who put us on to a special train, cars 
and all. After stopping for a public reception en route ^ 
organized for us with great kindness at Turin, we were 
taken straight through to Udine on the last day of 
August 1915. Our extra stores, which had been shipped 
before to Genoa, were sent up with amazing promptitude 
from that sometimes encumbered port. Truly there was 
no lack of efficiency or of spontaneity in the welcome 
accorded us by the Italians ! 

From Udine we were sent up in a few days' time 
to begin our service with the 6th Italian Army Corps 
under Monte Sabotino, in the zone of Cormons and 
Gorizia. Our first chief, the Direttore di Sanita of that 
corps, was Colonel Morino, a strong man and just, 
whose outward appearance fitly portrayed the inward 
bigness of his nature. He looked the embodiment of 
that expressive Italian phrase, " sta in gainba.'* For 
strangers in a strange land, whose first work was to learn 
their surroundings and the system of which they were 



OUR UNIT COMES OUT. 43 

to be a part, no better friend and father could have 
been found. 

In those early days we were also much indebted to 
Commendatore Ernesto Nathan. One of the most 
prominent retired politicians of Italy, formerly twice 
mayor of Rome in famous and controversial tenures of 
office, Nathan, when war broke out, was bowed with age 
and weakness of the heart such as would have kept any 
ordinary patriot at home. But he went up into the 
high Alps, a volunteer sotto-tenente, truly the most re- 
markable of " subs ! " When we arrived on the scene he 
was brought down from the mountains, attached to the 
Army Corps Staff at Cormons, and given, among other 
works, the congenial task of watching over the welfare 
of the Inglesi — one of the many bits of tactful kindness 
shown us by the authorities. I had known Nathan 
before, in his office on the Capitol ; but not till I met 
him on this more intimate footing in Cormons did I 
realize at their full human worth his humour, shrewd- 
ness, and kindness, his burning patriotism for Italy, and 
for the freedom of the world. Too soon his heart failed, 
and the doctors carried him off, an unwilling captive, 
to Rome. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ISONZO FRONT, 1915-1916. 

Monte Sabotino — ^The Quisca road — The bad winter — Battle and cholera 
—The King — ^Mountain roads and road-making — ^The genio — Fiats, 
and mules. 

nPHE frontier of three hundred miles of high Alps, 
extending in an undulating line from the Stelvio, 
on the Swiss border, down by Lago di Gar da, up again 
through the Carnic, and down again to the Julian Alps, 
had been rushed in the first days of the war. The 
Italians had secured for themselves good positions on 
the enemy side of the watershed, which gave them a 
sense of security behind the back of their offensive on 
the more practicable Isonzo front. Neither party, until 
the Austrians in May 19 16, attempted any serious ad- 
vance anywhere on the immense stretch of the higher 
Alps. 

The southernmost Alpine giant, Monte Nero, towers 
high above Caporetto and Tolmino. Its capture by the 
Alpini in June 191 5, one of the finest feats in the whole 







■"' Ehreaiiii-t 
•aad 






Zfzl 






jV>te« 


















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LTervai 



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FoUanil. 






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\ .AiieiK 



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GUIaF olf 



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schafiK 

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Fontan. 



deOaJUa, 

jpuA^ ^ x> ]r j^ tic 

taeFo 



'llboe 



s:ea 




14 



lAP I. —The Zone of War. 



^Rcirlfi«,lgincy». F.Jir' 



UNDER SABOTINO. 45 

European war, aroused the almost incredulous admira- 
tion of Lord Kitchener when he saw its precipitous 
cliffs during his visit that November. Thence down 
to the sea the mountains are relatively lower. For at 
Tolmino the Isonzo plunges southwards into a deep 
gorge between wooded hills only some 2,000 feet high 
— that is to say, as high as the higher Lake mountains of 
England, and, on the average, as steep. After turning 
the shoulder of Monte Sabotino, the clear blue stream 
rushes out into the little plain, girt by fruit-bearing hills, 
where lies the city of Gorizia. 

Behind this gorge of the Middle Isonzo the Austrians 
had retired, as behind a deep moat ready dug for them 
by nature. But where the river begins to debouch into 
the plain they had kept on the Italian bank two strong 
outposts, Monte Sabotino and the wooded Oslavia- 
Podgora ridge. They held them till August 19 16 
against a series of the fiercest attacks, and so long as 
they held them they could continue to occupy Gorizia. 
Farther to the south, while the Lower Isonzo wanders 
off through the great plain of Aquileia to the sea, the 
bare tableland of the Carso protected the more direct 
approaches to Trieste. Such were the scenes famous 
now for ever in Italian history, where hundreds of 
thousands of the best youth of Italy shed their blood in 



I 




Map II. — General Map of the Eastern Frontier. 

(Line of old political boundary marked.) 

46 



UNDER SABOTINO. 47 

attacks that were not fruitless, for a cause which time 
has crowned with success. 

Our cars, in the first days of September 191 5, were 
sent up to be stationed, some at Quisca over against 
Monte Sabotino, and some at Vipulzano for the service 
of the Podgora fighting. In those two villages they re- 
mained quartered till they went on into Gorizia in the 
days of its capture. 

When the Italian war broke out, Sabotino was a 
stronghold of nature and of art. On the side towards 
the Isonzo gorge, of which we saw much at a later date, 
it fell in wooded precipices straight down into the river. 
But on the side which in 1915 faced the Italian out- 
posts, the mountain presented a glacis of limestone rock 
sloping away to east and south from its triangular sum- 
mit. Athwart this immense natural glacis the Austrians 
had, during the months of Italian neutrality, blasted out 
in the limestone surface a deep trench, which the Italians 
called par excellence the trincerone. They had also hol- 
lowed out for themselves great chambers in the rock, 
where thousands of men could shelter during the pre- 
liminary bombardments of twenty-four or forty-eight 
hours' duration, which in those early days of the war 
always preceded attack. Against these previously pre- 
pared defences the Italians on the open glacis of the 



The shaded line is that 
of the Italian front from 
June 1915 to Aug. 1916. 




Map III. — The Isonzo Front, June 1915 to 
August 19 16. 



UNDER SABOTINO. 49 

mountain had to push forward such trenches as they 
could improvise, scraping them out in the interstices 
of the rocks, or piling loose stones into walls like the 
roughest of those on our own northern moors. It was 
a contest on unequal terms. 

These operations on the face of the mountain we 
used to watch from the vineyards behind our house at 
Quisca, two miles from Sabotino as the crow flies across 
a deep valley of chestnut woods. The Austrians were 
always invisible, deep in their trincerone and its com- 
municating passages. But we could see the Italian out- 
posts crouching behind their stone walls, and on the 
occasions when anybody moved in the open — that is, 
on the days of Italian attack at sunset — ^we could see 
every figure with absolute distinctness till night obscured 
the scene. 

In the other direction we looked from our perch at 
Quisca over as fair a view as there was in any zone of 
war : fruit-laden hills in the foreground falling steeply 
away to Cormons and the great plain ; the plain itself 
in its vastness, broken in the distance only by the giant 
campanile of Aquileia and by the silver windings of the 
Lower Isonzo ; the Carso and its puffs of shell smoke ; 
Podgora ridge, green with waving woods in the summer 
when the Italians first came, but already stripped and 

(2,041) 4 



50 SCENES FROM ITALY^S WAR. 

scarred by shell fire into a brown-red hue, catching the 
eye from far ; and the quiet Adriatic bounding the 
scene where so many myriads were transacting so strange 
a business. 

Indeed, from Quisca so large a strip of the Euro- 
pean war-line was visible at a glance that in mental 
vision one saw it all, from the Flanders flats to the 
foothills of Jura ; jumping peaceful Switzerland, on 
again from Stelvio snows to here ; and then, far to 
the north, the wavering, shifting line of misery rolling 
back and back over the infinite Russian steppes. One 
sat above, like Thomas Hardy over his Napoleonic 
puppet-show. Was this too as purposeless as that had 
been ? Would it leave that mere bitter memory, but vaster 
far, for the poets of a later age to mourn over in melo- 
dious outcries against deaf heaven and the senseless 
gods ? Our faith was that this time it was far other. 
Even Hardy shared that faith with us. This time it was 
the Peoples warring the last great war to tame and 
bind the Dynasts. We had only to win ! It would 
be no Leipzig this time, enslaving while it freed. 

But winning just then was so horribly dubious, with 
that still shifting line on the Russian steppes and in 
martyred Serbia. And when Hardy's spectator cast his 
visionary eye over the waste Atlantic, he saw, indeed, 



THE QUISCA ROAD. 51 

the English guardships and the ships of England going 
through the wreaths of spray, but beyond, where most 
he strained his eye to see the shore of a mighty nation 
astir, was still mere rolling cloud-swathe over a hidden 
land. Behind that ominous, bright cloud, what was the 
Great Scene-shifter preparing for the fifth act of Hardy's 
new world-drama, " The Peoples " ? The cloud lay 
impenetrable on Columbia's shores. The scene moved 
heavily back to Quisca street and the murmured talk of 
Italian muleteers in the night. 

We were still, little as we thought it, only at the 
beginning of the second act. And modern war in 19 15 
was still in its infancy : though Sabotino was one of 
the most important theatres of Italian operations, the 
force of artillery on either side was still very small in 
numbers and calibre, judged by the standard of two 
years later. The trincerone suffered little from the pro- 
longed bombardments of that winter. The Austrians 
in reply shelled our road, and their fire broke up most 
of the houses and hamlets along it, except only that 
half of Quisca in which we and our friends of the 4th 
Italian Sanita section lived, which was protected from 
enemy sight by a knoll. 

But the wonder is that the Austrians did not contrive 
to do more harm to this road, then the one and only 



52 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

means the Italians had of feeding their battle-line against 
Sabotino and Oslavia. A more exposed artery of traffic 
it would be difficult to imagine. For most of the way 
from San Martino through Quisca to San Floriano it 
ran along the top of a ridge in full sight of the enemy 
on Sabotino, and before July 1916 there was no screen- 
ing. Sometimes they stopped all passage by a few 
hours' steady shelling on one spot ; but then, just when 
things were beginning to be serious for the Italian com- 
munications, they would turn their attention somewhere 
else, and allow the road to be mended and traffic to be 
resumed. 

The bulk of the Italian supplies, of course, came up 
after dusk. The most difficult task which our ambulances 
had to perform that winter was to make their way to and 
fro between Quisca and Cormons through the blocked 
mules, lorries, and infantry, in the utter darkness and rain 
of the winter nights, when to show a light would be to 
invoke danger for all. The mountain road, constructed 
for peasants' carts, not for the traffic of an army, had 
not yet been taken in hand by the genio (engineers). It 
was in places extremely narrow, it was often from one to 
two feet deep in greasy mud, and it wound in sharp 
curves along the side of twenty- to forty-foot drops. 
Those of our number who had been in Flanders the 



THE QUISCA ROAD. 53 

winter before said that the driving from Quisca was far 
more difficult and the roads much worse. 

For hours every night it was impossible to get a 
move on at all in the one narrow street of Quisca, where 
the up-coming and down-going columns of lorries and 
mules met each other punctual as the clock every night 
at ten, and held each other up for hours. Night after 
night I used to call in our good friends the Italian 
officers of the 4th Sezione Sanita to help untangle the 
coil in which our ambulances were bound. The line 
thus held fast often stretched a good mile on either side 
of the village. Every one was extraordinarily patient 
and good-natured, as the Italian way is — ^too much so, 
we sometimes thought. Why the Austrians never fired 
at night on this helpless target I cannot conceive. They 
had the range of the road to a hair*s-breadth. 

As to road management, it is an English speciality, 
or obsession. The blood of the coaching days runs in 
our veins, and we each carry across the sea the soul of 
a Piccadilly policeman. " Coelum non animum mutant** 
The Italian Carabinieri — whose cocked hats are now 
familiar to many in our island since the famous visit of 
their band — have the finest tradition of any standing 
military police force in the world. They are men picked 
among their fellows — just, fearless in the presence of 



Wf sS f ^-^ ' * i m^'*^ ti<if^^ tMa& ri 



54 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

authority, and altogether good to deal with, as we often 
found. They had, in our eyes, one failing only : they 
did not understand road management. But that too 
some of them learned from the British army in 191 8, 
and I hope the art will spread through Italy after the 
war. 

In daylight our ambulances were among the chief 
users of the road, and often had to run the gauntlet. 
The enemy could see the red cross clearly enough, but 
cared no more about it on cars than on the dressing- 
stations and field hospitals, which they systematically 
destroyed along the same road. Respect for the Red 
Cross seems to vary with the artillery colonel, or, perhaps, 
with the general of division. When the enemy were on 
Santa Caterina and San Gabriele in 19 17, our cars ran daily 
beyond Gorizia to Salcano at the foot of these moun- 
tains safely in open daylight, when nothing else could 
start with impunity before nightfall. It was not so 
on the Quisca road, nor always so near Gorizia. Men 
vary in humanity, in the Austrian army as elsewhere. 

A curious legend grew up this first winter among our 
Italian friends at Quisca. I have since been told the 
apocryphal story half a dozen times by different Italian 
officers in different zones of the war. The legend is that 
one of our drivers carrying Austrian wounded was 



BATTLE AND CHOLERA. 55 

shelled ; that he accordingly stopped the car, and when 
the inmates clamoured to him in their strange tongues 
to go on, he lit his pipe, and told them that he would 
wait with them under fire for five minutes, in order that 
when they returned to Austria they might tell their 
people that the Austrian artillery really did fire oh 
ambulances ! 

On October 19, 191 5, the Italian preliminary bom- 
bardment began on Monte Sabotino, and till the end 
of November a prolonged winter offensive was sus- 
tained against all the positions protecting Gorizia. It 
was the least successful of all the great Italian offensives ; 
but for a display of sustained gallantry by hundreds of 
thousands, under heavy losses and most discouraging 
conditions of cholera and winter weather, it was a story 
of which any race could well be proud. How often in 
the chill October sunsets I watched from Quisca hill 
the Granatieri moving forward from behind their stone 
walls across the glacis of Sabotino into the falling cloud 
of night and doom ; then in a few hours the tide of 
stretchers began to arrive in the courtyard of the old 
eighteenth-century Schloss where the section worked, 
dressing the wounded as they came in, and loading 
them into our cars for Cormons. By midnight the 



56 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

whole place was littered with hundreds of prostrate, 
mangled forms, among whom the devoted surgeons, 
sleepless for days and nights on end, worked themselves 
far beyond their strength in the struggle to keep level 
with the insistent flood ; and always towards dawn, 
amid the grim scene, made grimmer by the cold, re- 
turning twilight, the discouraging rumour from the 
front ran round — " e andato male." Yes, badly has it 
gone, my brave friends, for the time, but not vainly ; 
1 91 8 shall make amends for 191 5, and without your 
sacrifice now the final victory can never be bought. 

In November, as the offensive still continued, re- 
newed again and again, our cars worked farther along 
the road towards the Italian artillery centre of San 
Floriano, to fetch in cases from a series of dressing- 
stations and cholera collecting centres at the front, 
which in the course of the month were one after the 
other destroyed by the enemy's fire. The cholera, 
derived from the enemy's trenches in this zone,* was 
at its worst, the victims dying in agony often in forty- 
eight or twenty-four hours, and the battle was raging 

* The Austrians had also brought cholera with them into Serbia 
during their unsuccessful invasion in the autumn of 1914. Fortu- 
nately it did not spread among the Serbians — almost the only plague 
that did not that winter. But in December 19 14, at Shabatz on the 
Danube, I saw houses recently evacuated by the Austrians marked 
in German as reserved for cholera. 



BATTLE AND CHOLERA. 57 

all the time. The difficulty of coping with the plague 
in the shell-broken hamlets at the front was great ; 
there were spacious cholera hospitals provided below 
in the plain, but the difficulty was to get the patients 
down off the hills in the then state of the roads and the 
shortage of working ambulances which the state of the 
roads produced. Up at the front it was impossible to 
provide for the patients. I remember entering the door 
of a church, and finding myself alone in company 
with twenty men lying on the bare ground in vari- 
ous attitudes of despair. On looking more carefully, I 
saw that fifteen were dead, and the remainder just dying 
of cholera, too far gone even to roll an eye asking for 
aid. The symbols of religion looked down on this silent 
section of the floor of hell ; it was like the scene of an 
allegory from Chaucer or the " Faerie Queene." 

There was little of the glamour and glory of the 
Ventiquattro Maggio about these scenes, and I re- 
member a cartload of stricken wretches as they arrived 
at one of these pest-houses crying out in bitter mockery, 
" Viva la guerra ! " and cursing those who had drawn 
Italy in. It was in these nights of mud and blood up 
on the San Floriano ridge that I first got an insight into 
the undercurrent of feeling against the war among the 
peasant soldiers, gallantly as they were fighting and 



58 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

bravely as they were enduring incredible hardships. I 
wondered forebodingly whether they could stand it for 
another year. They stood it for two more years before 
Caporetto, and recovered again after that. It is their 
endurance and recovery which need " explaining "— 
not Caporetto. There was no such terrorism to hold the 
army together as held together the Austrian army. The 
explanation is that, in spite of a very defective political 
education and much side-tracking by enemy influences, 
the Italian peasant at bottom loves his country, and is 
hardy and much enduring in body and in mind. 

Every one was doing his best ; but for awhile the 
number of victims of plague and battle together outran 
all possible provision in that well-nigh roadless hill 
region. I remember a ruined farm, in full view of 
the enemy on Sabotino, in and around which the cholera 
patients used to lie in scores ; one of our cars alone 
carried eighty-five patients from the ill-omened spot to 
Quisca in one long winter's night, the driver searching 
about with his torch to find the cases, and helping them 
into the car when found. On the other side of the 
road there stood another house, where the surgeons 
gallantly struggled to deal with the constant stream of 
arriving wounded. On November 28th the well-beloved 
medical Captain Perusini, one of an Irredentist patriot 



THE KING. 59 

family that has paid dear for love of Italy, and one of 
our best friends, was mortally wounded at his post, 
standing beside our men in the doorway of that house. 
A few minutes later another shell brought down half 
the house on the top of the wounded inside it. 

I recall those weeks of winter battle as having much 
the same effect on my senses as Irving 's staging of " Mac- 
beth " — scene after scene of dark days, dark nights, rain, 
mist, mud, through which loom out and disappear 
shrouded figures of the d'ead, the wounded, and the 
plague-stricken, amid the smell of chemical destructives 
and houses freshly ruined. 

Finally, in the first week of December a Scotch mist 
— nehbia Inglese the Italians call it — settled down and 
lay immovable on the scene of strife and misery, and 
the Italians reluctantly admitted that Gorizia must wait 
till next year. 

A familiar sight on the roads at the front during this 
arduous winter was a simple touring car crowded with 
six or seven Italian officers, one of whom was the King. 
Every one knew that Victor Emmanuel and his family 
and relations were doing their duty at the front. No 
one has ever called a member of the Casa Savoia imhos- 
cato, and that has negatively been a political asset of 



6o SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

great consequence. Further, the soldiers found out 
that the King was a thorough democrat, both politically 
and humanly ; that his heart was touched by their 
sufferings and sacrifices, a point about which they were 
always liable to be suspicious in the case of army com- 
manders. About the King, at any rate, there was noth- 
ing haughty or remote. His constant perambulation of 
the front was his way of thanking the army. Quiet and 
shy, with an " English " manner which has oddly dis- 
tinguished several of the makers of modern Italy, he 
none the less knew how to make himself respected and 
loved. Duty and democracy are his two watchwords, 
not a bad combination for a soldier king nowadays. 
His dislike of the theatrical and politically pretentious 
side of the " All Highest " business has proved, dynas- 
tically and otherwise, the safest line after all. The 
difference between Italian and German political ideals 
was perfectly represented by the difference between the 
heads of the two States. It is remarkable that in the 
course of ages the descendants of Tacitus 's " free Ger- 
mans " should have fallen to Byzantinism, while the 
descendants of those who burnt incense to the Roman 
emperors are as free from that particular form of polit- 
ical snobbery as any people in the world. 

The King's interest in us during the first months of 



>i- ' ■ ■ ^-j-"-. 



THE ITALIAN " GENIO." 6i 

our service in his army, and his public appreciation of 
our efforts, was altogether like himself, and I shall never 
cease to be grateful for it. 

When that dark winter had passed away, the spring 
and summer of 19 16 were brighter days in every sense. 
In the spring great victories of Italian organization and 
labour bettered the lot of the soldier, and prepared the 
ground scientifically for the successful renewal of the 
offensive in August. 

The first victory, though negative, was immensely 
important. The cholera was conquered. " We were 
confronted," writes Colonel Filippo de Filippi,* " by a 
triple problem, (a) We had to localize the outbreak, 
and prevent its diffusion among the whole army ; (b) 
we had to prevent the epidemic from spreading to Italy ; 
(c) we had to provide for the isolation and cure of the 
patients. The problem was faced and radically solved 
by the combined efforts of the civil and military sanitary 
organization, whose united efforts won what was, per- 
haps, one of the greatest battles of the whole war." 
Measures of isolation and quarantine on a vast and 
well-organized plan produced the desired result, and 

* " On some Special Problems of the Italian Medical War Services." 
Reprinted from the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 
1918, vol. xi. 



62 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR 

the cholera was never heard of again.* " These measures 
were supplemented by a strict surveillance of drinking 
water, food, and hygienic conditions of the houses, bar- 
racks, etc. The supply of drinking water required 
special organization. Owing to the scarcity of springs 
on the tablelands to the north of Vicenza, by the Isonzo 
and on the Carso, it became necessary to organize the 
transport of water by lorries or by pumps and water- 
pipes, and by the building of reservoirs. The troops 
on the Asiago tableland alone required 100,000 gallons 
of water per day." 

Henceforth, as I have seen again and again, on Pod- 
gora, Sabotino, Kuk, or on whatever hard-fought ridge 
or summit the Italian soldier planted his foot, in a 
few days a water-pipe and a teleferica (aerial railway) 
had followed him up to his new trenches on the height, 
and in a few weeks a good road for lorries and ambu- 
lances had reached the summit. 

The genio (engineers) is a magnificent branch of the 
army. All over the world, in both hemispheres, there 
are Italian civil engineers of great and varied individual 
ability pushing their own fortunes. These men, an- 
swering their country's call when the war broke out, 

* There had been 14,000 cases in the ItaHan army, of whom 46 
per cent. died. It was worst in our Gorizia zone. 



THE ITALIAN " GENIO." 63 

came back to form the military genio that has won so 
much foreign admiration. I knew several of these 
officers well, and it is difficult to find abler or finer 
men. From the spring of 19 16 onwards hundreds of 
thousands of labourers, civil and military, were put at 
their disposition — ^the myriads who usually form the 
annual " emigration " of Italian labour abroad. For 
hard work the Italian navvy has no superior, and, per- 
haps, no equal. Hence the miracles of road-making, 
light-railway laying, baracca-hMilding, bridging of rivers, 
boring out in the solid rock of trenches and underground 
galleries of immense size and complexity and in infinite 
number, and looping up of mountain tops with a system 
of aerial railways, that have distinguished the war both 
on the Isonzo and the high Alpine fronts. 

Any one who saw the transformation scene wrought 
on the vast Italian war front in 1916, schemed, organized, 
and carried through entirely by Italian brains and hands, 
without any German bottle-holder, as in the case of the 
Austrian army, will certainly never believe the foolish 
and timid cry of a certain section of Italians that Italy 
could never stand by herself, but must needs depend on 
Germany. It was not for want of skill in native brains 
and hands that Italy just failed in 19 17 to crush 
the Austrian armies, but simply from the want of 



64 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

moral self-confidence, which these whimperers had 
themselves engendered. Italy may look back with 
pride on her own material achievement in the war 
zone, and say with regard to her own future in peace, 
" Not Germany, nor another. Italia far a da se.^^ If 
she can say that with her heart she has an immense 
future before her. Her birth-rate is higher, her com- 
mon people more diligent than those of other nations. 
She is the land of many children. They play in a group 
round every farm door. There are no " small families " 
here. And they are a sturdy brood when they grow 
to manhood. All they need is native leadership ; and 
after what I have seen of the genio in war time I have 
hopes that they can get it. 

Of all the miracles of the genio, the roads naturally 
concerned us most. In January 191 6 they were so bad 
that one day we went out from Quisca and ourselves 
mended a small stretch where our ambulances could 
not pass for the slough, by the simple process of putting 
a neighbouring wall bodily into the mud.* But in the 
spring the great work was taken in hand, and in an 
incredibly short space of time the Italian front had 

* That day's work made me for the first time in my hfe understand 
the temptation and half forgive the vandalism of General Wade, who 
made the western part of the road from Newcastle to Carlisle passable 
by putting down into it the Roman Wall ! 



FIATS AND MULES. 65 

better roads, some remade and some new, than any 
front in the war — far better than the Austrian roads, 
as we found to our cost when we advanced on to the 
Bainsizza. The other armies of the world might have 
learnt much from the Italian road-makers. The work 
was rendered the easier by the presence of rock or 
gravel near the surface all through the hills and plains 
on the Italian war front. There were numbers of steam 
rollers employed, with the result that the surface as well 
as the engineering of these war roads was excellent. 
Before the war Italian roads, though well engineered, 
were far from smooth, as the steam roller was then rare. 

It was a glorious country for those who, like us, 
were constantly moving along this magnificent network 
of new roads, over fruit-laden hills round Gorizia, or 
along high limestone ridges, cloven by the deep gorge 
of the blue rushing Isonzo, often with the wide prospect 
of plain and sea, and even the Istrian mountains beyond 
Trieste visible over the top of the distant Carso. 

Our fellow- wayfarers on these Wonderful roads, 
besides the slow-moving, patient infantry, and the flit- 
ting staff-cars, were Fiat lorry drivers and muleteers. 

The Italian Fiat driver is skilful. In the exuberance 
of the early years of the war he sometimes trusted too 
much to his skill, and was given to causing surprises 

(2,041) 5 



1i ■^ir-'-"-'^'-'^^^''^^'^*^ 



66 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

round corners. The fact that the rule of the road — 
right or left — differs in different provinces and cities of 
Italy sometimes caused accidents, until it became im- 
pressed on the general imagination that in the war zone 
one kept to the right. But the skill, endurance, and 
courage of the Italian Fiat driver I have seen put to the 
proof again and again. As a mechanic, too, he is handy 
and quick to learn. The Italians take more naturally to 
the care and conduct of machines than ever they did 
to animals, and that is one reason why I believe Italy 
has a great future before her in the industrial age. 

Of the wonders of the Turin Fiat works in war time, 
and their ninety camions turned out daily, all the world 
has heard. But only those who have seen the long 
strings of these lorries at their unending war task on the 
mountain sides can judge what the Fiat has meant to 
Italy. What the bullock was to the old Balkan wars, 
the Fiat and the mule have been to the Italian war. As 
a hill climber the Fiat is unequalled. Neither Talbot 
nor Buick — ^the latter, in our experience, the best hill 
climber, year in year out, among British and American 
ambulances — can equal the Fiat for the daily grind up 
steep ascents of many thousand feet. Up to all the 
incredible places whither the genio led their spiral roads, 
the Fiats brought the heaviest stores of war ; and in 



FIATS AND MULES. 67 

the critical moments of the summer battles of 19 16, 
19 17, and 19 1 8 they whisked the infantry by hundreds 
of thousands between the Trentino, Asiago, and Isonzo 
fronts as occasion required, so enabling the Italian 
command to avail itself to the full of its solitary 
geographical advantage over the enemy — ^the inner line 
of communications. 

The carrying of the wounded by the Italian regular 
army ambulances was also done by Fiats, and nobly did 
the men and cars stand up to the work. But the Fiat, 
perfect as a mountain lorry, has a fault as an ambulance. 
Though it takes the hills splendidly, it vibrates too much 
for the comfort of the patients inside, and it is difficult 
to drive it slow — ^an important part of the art when bad 
cases are on board. I also think that our British am- 
bulances had better bodies than the Italians ; our sys- 
tem of stretcher racks makes it possible to load the bus 
in two or three minutes, while the elaborate Italian 
system of slings often takes a quarter of an hour or 
more loading. For work under fire, or whenever speed 
of evacuation is desirable, quick loading is very impor- 
tant. On the other hand, their big bodies took six 
stretchers to our four. But again the passage down the 
middle of our bodies enabled us to carry sitting cases 
with the stretchers. Anyhow it was a friendly rivalry. 



68 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

I have said that the Italian drives and manages motors 
better than animals. But much praise is due to the 
patient Italian muleteers, whom I have so often met at 
night, on screened and silent roads and slippery mountain 
paths up Santo, Kuk, or Gabriele, going and coming along 
the shelled mule track on their comfortless, dangerous, 
wearisome mission, unthanked. No change has been 
more marked in Italy since I first knew it twenty years 
ago than the improved treatment of horses and mules. 
But the war has quickened the pace of that reform, for 
the need for " war economy " of beasts of draught or 
burden by means of proper grooming and feeding was 
from the first understood by the military authorities, 
and soon became a habit with the muleteers and drivers 
which they will doubtless carry back with them to their 
farms when the war is over. 

The Italian cavalry officers' mounts, many of them 
bought in Ireland, were splendid animals, and their 
riders were often magnificent performers, known in 
European competitions. But, to go forward a little, I 
recall with pride the genuine pleasure of our Italian 
Allies at their first sight of the broad-bottomed, glossy- 
coated cart-horses of the British army, and its long- 
haired giant mules. A friend of mine, then a medical 
Major, used in 191 8 to run downhill from his quarters 



THE QUISCA MESS. 69 

every day to admire the passage of a convoy of English 
carts, and embrace the horses' heads. It was he, by the 
way, who told me that he had one day, to his great amuse- 
ment, seen a British Tommy, going home on leave, 
try to buy a cocked hat from a carabiniere on duty, to 
take home as a trophy. The sum he finally ran up to 
in his offers was fabulous, but he did not get the hat ! 

When I first knew this young Major Spelta three years 
before, he was a captain surgeon in the 4th Sanita at 
Quisca. It was at that Quisca mess that I first learnt 
what very good company Italian officers could be. How 
wonderfully the conversational ball was kept rolling, 
mostly about good-natured nothings, but never flagging, 
never dull ! Of the many good things said, I remember 
only one transferable from its human context. A soldier 
with a great and misshapen nose had come in with a 
message ; when he had gone, one of our surgeons said 
to his brethren, " Quel naso fa torto alia chirurgia 
Italiana " (" That nose is a disgrace to Italian surgery"). 
When, at due intervals, the conversation fell on politics, 
history, and war, it struck me that not less good sense 
and much more historical knowledge than is the por- 
tion of the educated Englishman, were common among 
Italian officers. On rarer occasions a loud-voiced con- 
troversy arose like a sudden tornado between two com- 



70 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

batants, till both were finally stalking about the room 
and shouting together in a manner highly diverting but 
quite inaudible to the spectators. Then suddenly down 
they would sit ; the tornado had passed. 

Oh, we were never dull in the Quarta Sezione Sanit^ 
at Quisca ! Geoffrey Young and I will always be grateful 
to that gay company for taking us strangers so com- 
pletely to its heart. And least of all shall we forget its 
President, Major (now Colonel) Celio Nota, of Torino, 
whose humour, warmth of heart, good sense, and abso- 
lute devotion to the service of the wounded enabled 
him to fill to perfection the difficult post of medical 
chief at Quisca in that first terrible winter. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE ISONZO FRONT, I916. 

Plava bottom — The Carso gas attack — Alpini, Bersaglieri, Arditi — 
Granatieri — ^The taking of Gorizia, Aug. 19 16. 

T MENTIONED above that when the war began in 
May 19 1 5 the Austrians retired behind the Isonzo 
gorge, on the course of the river above Monte Sabotino. 
Such remained for two years the general position, the 
ItaHans occupying the western bank of the gorge, the 
ridge of Monte Planina and Monte Corada. But they 
had secured for themselves a precarious bridgehead across 
the Isonzo at Plava. By desperate gallantry and terrible 
losses in June 191 5, with very little support from artil- 
lery, they had forced their way across the river, seized 
the village and railway station of Plava at the bottom of 
the gorge, and established themselves on the quota ^ or 
Hill of Plava, on the far side. They had extended this 
bridgehead to include the hamlet of Zagora a mile down 
stream, on the lower slopes of Monte Kuk.* 

* See Map III. above and Map VII. below. 
71 



72 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

This position, untenable by all the rules of war, was 
held by the Italians from June 191 5 till it became their 
base for the conquest of Kuk in May 1917. There was 
constant fighting, but neither side was able to dislodge 
the other, although the Austrians had their trenches 
only a few yards above the Italians on the almost pre- 
cipitous sides of Kuk. In the hamlet of Zagora, a mere 
heap of stones, there was the semblance of part of one 
house left, occupied as a strong post in the Italian line. 
From its loopholes one saw the Austrian ruin ten yards 
away ; there was only room for one set of barbed 
wire on No Man's Land, to serve the purpose of 
both sides. They lived like that for one year and 
eleven months. 

A further weakness of the Italian bridgehead posi- 
tion lay in the fact that only one narrow road ran down 
from Verhovlje Pass to Plava bottom ; and it was over- 
looked at the distance of a kilometre by the Austrian 
artillery and machine gunners on Monte Kuk, across 
the Isonzo. Yet everything that the mules could not 
bring down to Plava through the forest tracks had to 
come down the exposed road. This bad line of com- 
munications largely accounted for the failure to capture 
Kuk in August 19 16, when Sabotino and Gorizia fell. 
Kuk and the Bainsizza beyond it fell in 1917 because 



PLAVA BOTTOM. 73 

General Badoglio had then made a second and more 
sheltered road down to Plava bottom from a point 
farther north on Monte Corada. 

In the spring of 191 6 we took over a service previ- 
ously done by the Italians, and sent an ambulance every 
night from Verhovlje to Plava bottom by what was then 
the only road. As it was an ambulance, the Carabinieri 
always allowed it to go first, at the head of the column 
of Fiat lorries that started down at a fixed hour after 
fall of dusk ; similarly, it led the way back when the 
midnight column, having discharged its load of shells, 
timber, and barbed wire in the crowded space above 
the river bank at Plava, ' was marshalled to start back 
uphill. The road was too narrow for cars to meet and 
pass, and was as yet too much exposed for the genio 
to broaden it. 

It was a romantic ride, especially on nights of any 
activity, with the star shells and rival searchlights reveal- 
ing with their shifting rays masses of scarred mountain 
side ; the gloomy gorge lay sheer below as we coasted 
down into its gulf, and the noising waters of many tor- 
rents mingled with the sounds of battle. In spite of the 
utmost efforts of two great armies, nature was still big 
enough to be lord and master of the Plava scene, by night 
or by day. In such eternal presences the long war itself 



74 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

was but the play of boys for an hour upon the mountain 
side. Twenty thousand years hence, as twenty thou- 
sand years ago, Kuk and Planina, under whatever names 
or none, shall still look down on the rushing Isonzo 
whitening the bones of men. 

I remember once, when a particularly heavy bom- 
bardment was being directed at the convoy waiting at 
Verhovlje in the gloaming for the order to start down 
into the gorge, the jolly young Fiat drivers amusing 
themselves by falling on the ground in paroxysms of 
affected terror every time a shell burst, and then catching 
hold of each other, and rolling over and over in sheer 
animal spirits. They were fine lads ; the pace they 
drove round the curves of that dark and narrow road 
did credit at least to their nerve and skill. 

At Plava bottom, when we first went down there in 
April 1 916, the wounded were still being collected near 
the railway station, in the only house still in use that 
was in full view of the Austrians, being protected by the 
Red Cross. However, the officer in charge told me 
they had had sixty shells aimed at them that day, some 
successfully, so they were thinking of moving. They 
soon afterwards transferred the dressing-station across 
the Isonzo to the enemy side of the river, where they 
could find shelter by huddling close up under the foot of 



PEASANTS NEAR THE LINE. 75 

Plava Hill. Thence the wounded were carried across 
the pontoon footbridge to our cars. 

Everything that the Italians used in their positions 
beyond the river had to be carried by hand or by mule 
across that one pontoon bridge. The enemy had the 
range of it, and hit it again and again ; but at least it 
was not actually visible to them, as was every other point 
on the Isonzo stream until the Italians captured Kuk in 
May 1 9 17. Till then, for two years, this was perforce 
the only bridge for feeding the Plava-Zagora position ! 

The Austrian machine gunner on Monte Kuk, who 
had so long tried in vain to render the road down to 
Plava impassable, was captured when the mountain fell, 
and had friendly conversations, laughingly comparing 
experiences with the Italian Fiat drivers, at whom he 
had taken so many shots across the river in the two 
years gone by. 

Sabotino raised its head and shoulders bare above 
the hills around it. But from Quisca downwards wave 
after wave of fruit and vine-laden hills rippled down to 
the great plain. For two springs we saw these hills 
shimmering all round us with the white glory of the 
fruit blossom, and for three autumns we watched the 
vine leaves on the same hills turn red and gold, the 



76 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

vineyards the while overgrown more thickly each year 
by a jungle of lovely weeds, which the returning hus- 
bandman has found, together with wrecked houses and 
new, broad, smooth roads for his produce. 

The peasants had been removed from Quisca ; but 
behind, from S. Martino downwards, they continued 
their ordinary life, occasionally suffering casualties, but 
getting entirely accustomed to the shells. I have heard 
a peasant woman, near Vipulzano, when the earth from 
the geyser thrown up by an Austrian 305 sprinkled her as 
she stood watching it, exclaim angrily, as she shook the 
mud off her dress, " O ! la brutta cosa ! " (" Nasty 
stuff!") 

The peasants in the hamlets of the hills were mostly 
Slovene ; in the plain and larger villages mostly Italian. 
The Slovenes were neither specially hostile nor specially 
favourable. There were certainly spies left in the hill vil- 
lages in sight of the Austrian lines, who signalled to the 
enemy in many ingenious ways, as, for instance, a woman 
shaking the crumbs off her white tablecloth outside the 
door of her inn. The Italians treated the inhabitants, 
Italian and Slovene, well, and, if anything, erred in want 
of strictness and in letting them live on, as they wished 
to do, in places where the civil population would have 
been cleared out by other armies. 



THE TRENTINO DANGER, MAY 1916. 77 

While the Italians were bending all their thoughts 
and energies to scientific preparation for a renewed 
offensive against Gorizia and Trieste, the enemy in May 
19 1 6 gave them a nasty surprise where they least expected 
anything. The line of high Alps, three hundred miles 
long, which they thought they had safely closed behind 
the back of their Isonzo operations, was forced at 
an ill-guarded point. The Austrian advance on to the 
Asiago plateau and down the Astico valley gave Italy 
some bad weeks, for it bade fair to compel an evacuation 
of Friuli and Venetia by the great army of the Isonzo, 
whose rear was now threatened. But Cadorna used to 
the full his one great advantage of the inner line of 
communications, slinging troops across from the Isonzo 
to the Trentino in the Fiat lorries. On May 22nd our 
friends of the 4th Sanita section went off to the Trentino 
at twelve hours' notice. 

The greatest danger at the end of May was in the 
Astico valley, where the enemy had taken the rock 
summits of Pria Fora and Cimone, and were pouring 
through the town of Arsiero down the valley itself, actu- 
ally on the level of the great plain. The Italians, who 
had been driven back far behind their prepared lines, 
had then no trenches in that region nor fastnesses 
hollowed out in the rocks, but met the invader hand to 




78 



THE TRENTINO DANGER, MAY 1916. 79 

hand, and thrust him back by desperate fighting over 
the precipices of Pria Fora. In the valley below, one of 
the farthest points reached by the enemy was Fogaz- 
zaro's country villa, built in a good modern style amid 
beautiful woods and meadows below Arsiero. It is now 
a mass of ruins in a world of war.* These actions saved 
Italy in the early days of June 19 16. 

In the latter half of June the recovery of further ground 
on the Asiago plateau, coinciding with the announce- 
ment of the amazing Russian victories marked by the 
capture or desertion of two or three hundred thousand 
Austrians, removed the last element of danger in the 
Trentino. It was a happy period for all Italians. In- 
tense relief from national peril, joy that they had saved 
themselves by their own exertions and by political unity 
and calmness at the bad moment, were combined with 
legitimate pride that the drawing off of the Austrian 
artillery and forces to the Trentino had rendered the 
Russian victories possible. At the same time the great 
British offensive on the Somme gave the Italians the 
sense that the advantage was passing to the side of the 
Allies, and a new-born confidence in the might of Britain 
as something more than a naval power. 

* I know the region well, because during 191 8 some of our cars were 
stationed in the town of Arsiero, as described in Chap. VIII. below. 



8o SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Under these happy auspices the men and guns began 
to pour back to the Isonzo front. The preparations for 
the great attack on Gorizia were resumed. In July, for 
the first time they screened our Quisca road for coming 
events. 

But first the Austrians made another nearly success- 
ful attempt to throw out the plans for the offensive. 
The Italians were already established on the edge of 
the Carso tableland ; but to take and hold Gorizia, still 
more to advance on Trieste, they would have to push 
along the Carso much farther. If the enemy could now 
prevent them by a surprise attack, thrusting them off 
the edge of the Carso down into the plain of Aquileia, 
Cadorna's whole plan would be ruined in advance. 

This scheme the Austrians almost carried to success 
by the unexpected use of poison gas on a large scale. 
Hitherto that weapon had played no part on the Italian 
front, where the story of the Ypres gas attack was merely 
as a tale that is told. The Italians had served out masks, 
but they fitted too close ; the troops complained of 
suffocation, and either neglected to carry them or threw 
them away in the hour of need. Hence the surprise 
by gas on June 29, 191 6, caused a frightful massacre in 
the Italian trenches, and drove whole regiments, stag- 
gering and dying as they went, off the edge of the Carso. 



THE CARSO GAS ATTACK. 8i 

If the Austrian infantry had all come on as they should, 
the disaster would have been irreparable. But some of 
them remained inactive, and the situation was saved by 
Colonel Gandolfi, who gathered round him half a dozen 
men in gas masks, and made shift to hold a trench until 
reinforcements came up. For this splendid service he 
was awarded the gold medal al valor e. Till then the gold 
medal had been reserved for those who had been killed, 
but it has since then gradually assumed a position more 
or less analogous to that of our V.C.* 

The Third British Red Cross Unit, commanded by 
Mr. F. Alexander, was then serving the Italians on the 
Carso ; but the victims of the gas attack were so numer- 
ous that our Unit was called on to send aid thither outside 
its ordinary sphere. I spent the night of June 29th-30th 
in the dressing-station of Sagrado at the foot of the 
Carso, while the cars of our two Units were coming and 
going, transferring load after load of poisoned wretches 
to the field hospitals in the plain. The courtyard and 
large garden beyond it were filled with tortured men, 
falling down under our eyes and dying in agony by 
hundreds together. The Italians, to whom this form 



* Below the gold are the silver and bronze medals al valors, and 
below them again the croce al merito di guerra (croix de guerre) insti- 
tuted in 1918. 

(2,041) 6 



82 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

of warfare was new and shocking, as it had been to our 
men at Ypres in April 191 5, were furious at the per- 
petrators, and everywhere we heard them exclaiming 
against the " barbarism and treachery " of the Austrians. 
But I noticed with pleasure that even in that terrible 
scene, when, if ever, vindictive passion would be let 
loose, the wounded prisoners were medicated and placed 
on our ambulances with the same tender care as on 
every other occasion, and in due rotation with the Italian 
victims of the gas. 

Several thousand Italians died, and several thousand 
recovered. But the lesson was not lost. After that 
every soldier carried an effective gas mask of Italian 
make in a tin box. Finally, after the arrival of the 
British army, our allies in 19 18 adopted the maschera 
inglese, as they called it, such as our own troops wear. 

The same spring and summer of 19 16 saw the gradual 
adoption of the shrapnel helmet. The first helmets — 
I remember the curiosity with which they were handed 
round at Quisca — ^were French, with " R.F." stamped 
on them. These became the model for the helmets which 
the Italians then manufactured for their whole army. 
The appearance of the ordinary infantry regiments was 
greatly improved by the change, for the squashy Italian 
beretto is a poor affair. The helmet gave them the 



THE BERSAGLIERI. 83 

appearance of Roman soldiers. Only the Bersaglieri 
and Alpini stood to lose in distinction by the exchange 
of their own traditional headgear. The Bersaglieri 
generally contented themselves with attaching a feather 
to their helmets in memory of the magnificent plumage 
that was theirs by ancient right. The Alpini tended to 
eschew the helmet, and as often as possible still appeared 
in their handsome felt hats, shaped like that in which 
Louis XI. kept his leaden images. 

The Bersaglieri w^ere founded by General La Mar- 
mora in the forties of the last century, and soon became 
the crack regiment of the little Piedmontese army that 
played so great a part in the making of Italy. They 
won their reputation in the Crimea in 1855 by the side 
of their English and French allies, and in the wars that 
freed their country from Austrian and Papalist in 1848- 
49, 1859-60, 1866, and 1870. Their nodding plumes 
and springing step, and the blare of trumpets behind 
which they ran into the battle, became the symbol of 
the Italian army to all Europe. 

They still take pride in their trumpets. In one Ber- 
sagliere regiment eighty privates were trained during 
the war as a band of trumpeters, without the men fore- 
going their other military duties. I shall never forget 
standing on a windy mountain top over the Isonzo 



84 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

gorge, to hear at a few yards' distance their brazen 
clangour musically salute the Alps at dawn, while Colonel 
Gotti apologized for a mere eighty when he hoped soon 
to have a hundred. 

But the famous Bersagliere-trot has been discarded 
as a method of marching, partly on medical grounds. 
We see its substitute in the numerous battalions of 
" Bersagliere ciclisti " which have played so important 
a part in the war. Hurrying up on their " push-bikes," 
these gallant troops are flung in wherever the fight is 
hottest and the call for quick reinforcement greatest. 
How often I have seen them coming at the hour of 
need ! Many of these cyclist battalions have been 
killed off and re-formed again and again. 

The first time that I came across the Bersaglieri 
intimately was in May 191 6, when our Unit played a 
football match against the 9th Bersaglieri ciclisti. They 
had a good team, and we won none too easily. They 
played what we call a very " clean " game, and it was 
a most friendly and pleasant occasion. After the match 
we were entertained by the officers of the battalion. 
The Major might have been forty, but the rest, in- 
cluding the captains, were young fellows of twenty or 
thereabouts. The Major told me that he was the fifth 
commandant of the battalion since the war began a year 



THE BERSAGLIERI. 85 

before, and the only one of the original officers who 
had not been killed or wounded. They were going up 
to the trenches again on the Carso in a few days, and 
there would soon be a sixth commandant. He was 
quite cheerful and gay, but confided to me that it was 
his task to turn these young men coming straight from 
home and college into ready-made Bersaglieri. It 
lay with him to give them the traditions and feel- 
ings of Bersaglieri, which, he said, had generally to be 
acquired by years of life in the corps. But these young- 
sters had to get it in a few months from him alone. 
After dinner they sat round and sang the special Ber- 
sagliere songs in fine loud chorus, while the Major 
strummed for them on a guitar. It was a *' family " 
party. I have seldom liked any company of strangers 
better, or been more touched by the occasion. That 
was as long ago as May 19 16, when the most prolonged 
and bitter fighting on the Isonzo front was still to come. 
How many of them are left now ? 

As to the rank and file of the Bersaglieri, they contained 
many of the noblest Italian types. I select the word 
carefully, for there is a strain of refinement or " nobility " 
of manner found in the best of the Italian common 
people which is not usual north of the Alps, though 
sterling qualities may be more universal. I have seen 



86 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

faces among the privates of the Bersaglieri as strong and 
yet refined as you would see in any society in the world. 
Their wounded never complained, and I remember how, 
after a bloody repulse in which certainly " some one 
had blundered," the returning Bersaglieri merely said 
to us " e andato male " with quiet dignity, when every- 
one else was loud-mouthed in objurgation. The disci- 
pline of the Bersaglieri is the best in the Italian army. 

Discipline is not the special point of the Arditi. 
Their merit is fierce and reckless courage, and a gaiety 
of boyish spirits that is infectious to the rest of the 
army, and has done much to keep up its fluctuating moral 
in these last two years of the war, when principally the 
Arditi have been in evidence. They are " Sturm Trup- 
pen," men " full of daring," as their name implies, 
selected by voluntary enlistment from the more active 
spirits in the ordinary regiments. They are specially 
trained, kept in the rear outside the life of the trenches 
till" the day of battle, and then hurried up in the Fiat 
lorries and sent in to carry the enemy positions. 
This system was gradually developed in the course of 
the present war, and reached its full proportions only 
in the last year, when the Arditi, in their loose, open- 
necked jackets, with the crest of the dagger and palms 
on the sleeve, became a sight familiar to all. Some 



THE ARDITI. 87 

battalions of them are given a special physical and 
athletic training, and to see the fiamme nere, as these 
are called on account of their black nightcaps, march 
past singing, stripped to the waist, is to see the physical 
side of man at its best. Skill in flame- thro wing, bomb- 
throwing, and the dagger at close quarters are their 
favourite arts ; holding the trenches by rifle fire after 
their capture is left to the ordinary regiments of infantry. 
Indeed, the Ardito lives in an atmosphere of bombs 
and flame. To get into the favoured corps from a line 
regiment, the aspirant has to satisfy the authorities in a 
pass examination which consists of running through a 
machine-gun barrage, at which a certain percentage of 
examinees are actually wounded. At reviews, when the 
Arditi oblige with an exhibition of their flame-throwing 
and bombing tactics, it is frequent for the " joyous and 
gentle passage of arms " to end in a few casualties. 
The Arditi have the reputation of throwing bombs at 
each other or at passers-by out of sheer high spirits. 
They are the ringleaders of the army in the constant 
bickering with the Carabinieri, who carry out so faith- 
fully and, as I believe, justly the disagreeable duties 
of Military Police. They call the Carabinieri *' aero- 
planes," on account of their wide- winged hats. An 
army order was issued forbidding any one to call a 



■■{^■■■■■i 



88 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Carabiniere an " aeroplane, " in senso di disordine (" in 
a disorderly sense "). A Carabiniere was once found 
lying bound on a mountain road I knew, with a label 
attached to him, Aeroplano nemico abattuto dagli arditi 
(" enemy aeroplane brought down by the Arditi "). In 
this standing quarrel my sympathies are all with the 
Carabinieri. But the reckless high spirits of the Arditi 
were a wholesome tonic to the moral of the army in the 
latter days. 

The Alpini, in origin and character, are neither so 
modern and impressionist as the Arditi, nor so dignified 
and early Victorian as the Bersaglieri. They date from 
the period immediately following the Risorgimento, when 
the new kingdom of Italy had acquired a mountain 
frontier marching with Austria. Raised mostly among 
the Alpine populations and a few from the Abruzzi, they 
were a splendid body of men when the war broke out. 
The taking of Monte Nero in June 191 5 was as fine a 
feat of arms and mountaineering combined as stands 
on record in history. I remember, when we were carry- 
ing some Alpini who had been wounded near Tolmino 
in the September of that year, thinking that I had never 
seen finer men. But on the Alpini, as on the Bersaglieri, 
the heavy, long-drawn weight of the war fell and rested ; 
the original Alpini were annihilated. Their successors 



THE ALPINI. 89 

were, indeed, not unworthy ; but they were not all re- 
cruited from the mountain districts, and they disclaimed , 
with a true modesty that did them no injury in our 
eyes, to be the equals of those who had fallen in the 
first two years of the war. 

Of this second generation, so to speak, of Alpini 
we saw much in 191 8, when some of our cars were 
working for them at the foot of the teleferiche, below 
the precipices of Pasubio. It struck me that the officers 
were more in touch with the thoughts, needs, and daily 
lives of the men than in the line regiments. Officers 
and men locked up together for months in the snow, 
as much away from the world as sailors on a voyage, 
naturally get to understand each other's needs. Vv^illing- 
ness and smartness prevailed among all ranks. 

Indeed, in many respects it is a special service, this 
Alpine warfare, distinct like that of the navy or the air. 
It requires men bom and bred in the mountains, and 
then trained to mountain warfare. The British and 
French troops fought splendidly in the high-raised 
Asiago plateau and its hills of pine ; but, except the 
French Alpins, they could not have been put on Pasubio 
or any similar rock citadel for six months of snow-bound 
life, with teleferiche for their only communications. 
They would have been only a little less out of their 



90 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

element than if they had been at sea. It was the Alpini 
who guarded the hundreds of miles of higher Alps 
between one valley and the next, quartered in the snow- 
bound arites and gullies for three livelong winters of 
actual warfare, under conditions that would have killed 
other troops less skilled in snowcraft, less hardy and 
less patient by inherited instinct to outface all that the 
high hills can do to drive man down from their summits. 
Besides Bersaglieri, Alpini, and Arditi, mention 
should be made of yet another corps d' elite, the Grana- 
tieri, selected for their height. We came across them 
in the winter of 191 5, in the fighting on Sabotino and 
Oslavia, where they lost very heavily. Transferred sub- 
sequently to the Duke of Aosta's Third Army, they went 
again and again into the desperate fighting on Carso and 
Hermada, and after the retreat took a leading part in 
the successful defence of the Lower Piave. Their repu- 
tation stands very high, and has been dearly bought. 

On the Isonzo front in the late summer of 19 16 
the preparations were ripe at length for the great offen- 
sive against Gorizia. The object of the enlarged 6th 
Army Corps, under General Capello, was to carry the 
bulwarks of the city on the Italian side of the Isonzo 
— Sabotino, Oslavia, and Podgora hills — and then, after 



THE TAKING OF GORIZIA. 91 

entering the city, to carry the heights beyond the river 
— San Gabriele and Monte Santo. If a corresponding 
advance was made on the north side of the Carso by the 
Third Army, under the Duke of Aosta, Gorizia could 
be safely occupied, and a starting-off place secured for 
the ultimate turning of the farther part of the Carso 
that covered Trieste. The objectives were, in fact, the 
same as those of the long, unhappy offensive of the pre- 
vious winter, but the means and methods were very 
different. The spirit of Badoglio, Capello*s chief of 
staff, had now first made itself felt in the Italian war. 
The work of the genio for six months past had supplied 
the network of roads, the gun emplacements, and war- 
like provision of every kind in the zone of Gorizia. 
But, unfortunately, General Capello's command did not 
yet include the Plava bottom and the approaches to 
Monte Kuk, as it did in the following year. 

The change since the last winter was audible in the 
first minutes of the battle, when, at six o'clock on August 
6, 1916, the quiet summer Sunday morning was startled 
and deafened by a very different kind of bombardment 
from any before heard on the Italian front. Early the 
same afternoon all Monte Sabotino was in Italian hands. 
The terrific barrage on the trincerone * kept the Austrians 

* See page 47 above. 



The shaded line is that 

of the Italian front in 

July 1916. Kaiiibresko 

The dotted line is that © 

after August. 



sate. Plaiiisra. 

Plava 

Verhovlje 

o 

QuiscaO 
S. Floriano (3| 




te. Kuk-^- 
agora / 

^ Batnsizza 
, k Plateau 

Mte. Santo „ 
,;..■ Teroovo 

^aicaao Plateau 

•" l^te. S. Gabriels. 
iraOf^GOElIZlA. "'"^ 




Map V. — The Offensive of August 1916. 



THE TAKING OF GORIZIA. 93 

paralyzed in their rock chambers, whence they should 
have issued to hold the great trench against the Italian 
assault. The assailants, coming up the steepest way 
from the bottom of the valley on the south-west, crossed 
the broken defences without meeting resistance, and 
occupied the two entrances to the great dug-out while 
the inmates were still inside. Sabotino and its defenders, 
after defying Italy for fifteen months, had been captured 
almost without loss a few hours after the bombard- 
ment began. Here was scientific war at last. It was 
Badoglio's first great triumph. 

Prior to the year 19 18 the Italian campaign was dis- 
tinguished from the campaign in Flanders by the large 
numbers of prisoners taken on both sides. One reason 
was the readiness to surrender of many of the subject 
populations of Austria-Hungary ; but another was the 
character of the ground. The hard limestone of the 
Sabotino and Kuk district enabled both sides, by blast- 
ing operations and machine drills, to bore out chambers 
in which thousands of men could be safely housed with 
a sense, highly attractive to the inmates, of complete 
security so long as they refrained from coming out. In 
the muddy soil of Flanders such large, safe dug-outs 
could not easily be constructed. But when an impor-' 
tant system of dug-outs was captured on the Italian 



94 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

front, it disgorged prisoners by thousands at a time. 
Centuries hence, while the blue rushing Isonzo, noising 
far below, still sings its ancient song, the hill-wandering 
shepherd will marvel to discover subterranean labyrinths 
and palatial caverns hollowed out by the giants of old 
beneath the deserts of his thin mountain pastures, and 
will weave strange legends of their first purpose, none 
stranger, surely, than the truth. 

On the evening of August 6th and the following days 
the prisoners began to pour down the roads in columns 
of a thousand at a time, gladdening the hearts of the 
up-coming Italian regiments. They were happy meet- 
ings, full of kindly human nature, and encouraging to 
the hopes of future democratic peace. The prisoners 
were frankly glad that their warfare was accomplished, 
and the Italians, while rejoicing to see these signs of 
victory, sympathized with the evident relief of their 
late enemies at being individually out of the war. One 
touch of nature quickly makes the Italian peasant-soldier 
akin with all the world. The Italians were now mostly 
in shrapnel helmets, but their captives were still in 
slouchy, dishevelled forage caps. Only in the next 
year's battles did the heavy Boche helmet gradually 
make its appearance in the Austrian ranks. 

Though high, bare Sabotino had been won so 



THE TAKING OF GORIZIA. 95 

quickly and at so cheap a price, there were three days' 
fierce fighting for the lower, wooded heights of Oslavia 
and Podgora. Wooded, indeed, they no longer were, 
for twelve months of seldom-intermitted local warfare, 
in which systems of trenches had changed hands and 
groimd been shifted again and again, had reduced both 
Oslavia and Podgora ridges to a rubbish heap worthy 
of the most chosen spots on the Western front. Un- 
wearied nature, who waits for no public funds to com- 
mence her work of reconstruction, has already in two 
years covered up the ravages with coarse grass ; but 
houses, vineyards, and terraces are as though they had 
never been, lying mixed together under the grass with 
the bones of heroes. Man looks on helpless at the ruin 
he has made, and it may well be long ere the peasant 
lives there again and tills new fields. 

The fight was specially fierce for Podgora ridge top, 
scientifically armed, trenched, and caverned. It was 
turned at both ends, and surrounded for some con- 
siderable time before it surrendered. Then the Italians 
plunged across the Isonzo to occupy the town. The 
foremost man was Sub-lieutenant Aurelio Baruzzi, aged 
nineteen ; his preliminary feat was, with three followers, 
to capture several hundred Austrians crowded in the 
famous railway tunnel between Podgora height and river, 



.^..,,,.,^a^^.„..,H^>.; „>^. . , T ■ , ■..v.,,^,.a.y<|w.v 



96 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

where he held them captive for a long time till rein- 
forcements came.* He then led a small party across the 
bridge, entered Gorizia, and raised the Italian flag that 
he always carried in his pocket on the roof of the pas- 
senger station, as a signal to his compatriots to follow 
the daring patrol across the river. He was given the 
then very rare distinction of the gold medal for his day's 
work, and found himself suddenly famous. But he was 
still the same simple and modest sub-lieutenant when, 
some months later on, two of our drivers met him and 
made friends with him on the Liga heights. 

Not many yards to the north of Baruzzi's railway 
tunnel, at the southern entrance of Podgora factory town, 
the industrial suburb of Gorizia on the western bank of 
the Isonzo, stands a high garden wall displaying to the 
road a mural monument. It commemorates an Austrian 
Count who, in 1809, led fifty men out of Gorizia across 
the river, and surprised and held a trench fort on the 
summit of Podgora ridge. For more than a year, during 
the jfirst occupation of Gorizia by the Italians, I used to 
pass the monument on the average once a day, the 
Italian guns barking over its head from the neighbouring 



* One end of the tunnel had been solidly blocked up by the Aus- 
trians, who were, therefore, trapped in it. The Italians opened the 
tunnel again so as to use the road through Podgora village. 




Map VI. — The Capture of Gorizia; Carso Positions after August 1916. 

(The shaded line represents the positions at end of August 1916. The dotted line 

shows the approximate furthest point reached on the Carso in 1917. ) 

(2,041) 97 7 



98 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

garden. It seemed at the time a satirical comment on 
a hundred years of modern progress in a circle. But 
now we have good reason to hope that the opening of the 
twenty-first century, when it comes, may see Latin and 
Teuton better engaged than in crossing and re-crossing 
the Isonzo stream, and killing each other on Podgora 
height. 

Just the other side of the railway tunnel, to the 
south, below the broken railway viaduct, an iron bridge 
spanned the Isonzo.* The bridge, shot through again 
and again, was practically impassable for any save foot- 
passengers till the genio had repaired it. However, on 
the night of August Qth-ioth, Geoffrey Young took four 
of our cars across in a jam with the artillery and horse- 
carts, and fetched out wounded from the town. They 
were certainly the first ambulances, and, I believe, the 
first automobiles, to cross the river and enter Gorizia. 
The holes were the principal feature of the bridge at 
the time, but Young guided the cars one after another, 
inch by painful inch, over these perilous chasms all night. 
At dawn the Austrian shooting had rendered the bridge 
utterly impassable, and nothing more was allowed across 
till next nightfall. Meanwhile the genio laboured all 
day repairing the bridge under a heavy fire. 

* See Map VI. 



THE TAKING OF GORIZIA. 99 

That day (August loth) I crossed by a footbridge 
higher up the river into Salcano village north of Gorizia, 
at the foot of San Gabriele, where the Italians were 
already fighting hard for the lower slopes of that now 
famous mountain that completely dominates Gorizia. 
Near the footbridge I found General Venturi, command- 
ing the northern division that we were supposed to serve 
from Quisca, and agreed with him that the British cars 
should cross the river farther south by the only possible 
way, the iron bridge used by Young the night before, 
that they should come up north again through Gorizia 
into Salcano, and carry off his wounded thence. I then 
made my way round to the iron bridge and talked to 
the genio officers working on it as to the likelihood of its 
being reopened for traffic that night in time for the ful- 
filment of this new plan. 

As I was turning back from the end of the bridge, 
a figure in an English correspondent's khaki uniform 
jumped on to the road beside me. As I was wondering 
who my fellow-countryman would be, for clearly he was 
not my friend Mr. M'Clure, I suddenly saw behind him 
the thin, aquiline form of Mr. Wickham Steed, the evil 
genius of the House of Hapsburg, and the avenging 
angel of the races oppressed by the Dual Monarchy. 
He had come to the right place at an historic hour. 



loo SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Then it dawned upon me by inference that his com- 
panion must be Lord NorthcHffe. Their arrival at 
Gorizia at the moment of its fall was of ultimate impor- 
tance to the long-deferred unity of front, and to the 
understanding of Italian needs and anti-Austrian oppor- 
tunity by the generals, statesmen, and peoples of the 
Entente. 

That night, according to the arrangement with Gen- 
eral Venturi, the British cars were brought round from 
Quisca and Vipulzano by the southern route over the 
iron bridge, now repaired, through Gorizia streets lit by 
burning houses, and out along the northern road into 
Salcano village, whence we carried back wounded by 
the same route. Next day (August nth) British and 
Italian ambulances both worked over this ground by day- 
time. The dressing-station of the 45th Section was 
moved twice that day, each time farther back towards 
Gorizia along the Salcano road, as the houses in which 
it had been established were one by one broken up 
by shells. The Italian orderlies and stretcher-bearers 
worked well in trying conditions, under our friend, the 
energetic medical Major Bocchia, who was always to the 
front, and ended by being captured beyond Monfalcone 
in the following May. 

During this and the following days roads, bridges, 



THE TAKING OF GORIZIA. loi 

and houses on the east side of Podgora ridge were kept 
under a heavy Austrian bombardment, with little reply. 
For a time the tables were turned in the matter of artil- 
lery. The battle had begun on August 6th with an 
Italian predominance against Sabotino and Podgora ; 
but now the Italian guns were in process of being moved 
up, and till they got into their new positions it was a 
bad time for the troops round Gorizia and Salcano and 
at the foot of San Gabriele, that terrible mountain that 
was never completely taken till it fell unfought for in 
November 1918. The Italian infantry who had crossed 
the river also suffered from shortage of rifle ammunition, 
for even the footbridges were few, and were constantly 
broken by the Austrian shell fire. 

And so by August 15th the Italian advance reached 
its limit for the year.* Half the objectives of General 
Capello's army corps had been attained, and the Third 
Army had correspondingly pushed forward on the Carso, 
capturing San Michele and the heights on both sides 
the Vallone, and thereby making Gorizia safe to the 
south. But nothing could have enabled the Gorizia 
army corps to complete its work by the capture of San 
Gabriele and Monte Santo at the first rush, except a 
simultaneous attack on Monte Kuk from the Plava 

* See Map V. above, dotted line, and Map VI., shaded line. 



I02 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

bottom. This attack, however, was only delivered after 
the Gorizia army corps had been fought to a standstill, 
and after the Austrians had had time to bring their 
reserves back from the San Gabriele region successfully 
to defend Monte Kuk. 

General Capello and his chief of staff had won their 
laurels as the conquerors of Gorizia, and if the Plava 
attack had been mistimed it was not their fault, for it 
was not in their zone that year. The Plava sector ought 
always to have been under the same command as the 
Gorizia zone, because Kuk, Monte Santo, and San 
Gabriele were all one geographical and military system. 
This mistake was fully realized and remedied in 1917. 

The personality of General Capello was remarkable. 
A short, stout figure, with a face suggesting at first sight 
bonhomie and nothing more, there was, as one soon 
found, a fire of zeal and energy underneath. Shortly 
before the taking of Gorizia he had been driving through 
a village street where a mad soldier was flourishing 
about with a bayonet. The bystanders were afraid to 
tackle him. The General leapt from his touring car, 
and himself disarmed the madman. 



CHAPTER V. 

Villa Trento Field Hospital — Gorizia during the occupation — 
The Carso. 

TFAURING the first two years and more of our work 
'^-'^in Italy — until, in fact, the Retreat brought that 
side of our activities to an end — ^the field hospital at 
Villa Trento,* working for the 6th Italian Army Corps, 
formed a part of our Unit. The Director of the hos- 
pital was Dr. Brock, well known for twenty years past 
in Rome. His courtesy, tact, and long-acquired sym- 
pathy with things Italian, and the skill in the language 
acquired by many of our nurses, enabled him to give 
to our hospital an Anglo-Italian character that made the 
soldiers who came there glad to be in the hands of 
foreigners who understood and attended so well to their 
wants and feelings. This, to my thinking, was a con- 
siderable feat. 

The hospital leant much on Scotland, for, besides 
Dr. Brock, we also had the honour to have with us 

* See Map II. 

103; 



-^! . J^l^.-.^-4W..,W,^ ^ . 



I04 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Sir Alexander Ogston, whose fame and whose quiet, 
benevolent courtesy to all persons great or small added 
to the prestige and popularity of Villa Trento. Dr. W. 
E. Thompson, of Canada and Scotland, ably represented 
the younger generation of surgery. 

Villa Trento grew to be a field hospital of i8o beds, 
with a nursing staff of a score of British Sisters and 
V.A.D.'s, under the matron. Sister Power. But this 
organization was only gradually built up, for when we 
first came out, in August 191 5, the Italian authorities 
still had a rule against women nurses at the front. At 
the very moment of our arrival this rule was set aside, 
and we were encouraged to send for women nurses. 
In this aspect of hospital work the country of Florence 
Nightingale has two generations start of Italy, and 
nothing was more interesting than to see the employ- 
ment of women nurses begin and take root in the 
Italian field hospitals around us. Those of them whom 
we saw — ^like the Signorina Italia Garibaldi, in whom 
the heroic traits of the family were not wanting — were 
capable and devoted to a degree, struggling each to 
do the work of ten women, for naturally in the infancy 
of the movement the supply of trained or even half- 
trained nurses was small. 

This important development took place under the 



VILLA TRENTO FIELD HOSPITAL. 105 

fostering care of the Duchess of Aosta, the head of the 
ItaHan nurses. She was a frequent visitor at Villa 
Trento, a good friend to us English, and, as we are proud 
to remember, an admirer of our hospital. It has been 
a great good fortune for this difficult early period of 
female nursing in Italy, and for the sick and wounded 
during the war, that the Duchess of Aosta was a born 
leader. She established the position of female nurses 
at the front against all old-fashioned critics. Not only 
does she possess the distinctively " royal " qualities in 
an attractive form, but she is a lady of great wisdom in 
management and of tireless energy and devotion. In 
difficult times, both in the Retreat and very notably dur- 
ing the equally rapid and longer advance in November 
1 9 18, when the excellent machinery of the Italian field 
hospitals was thrown out of gear by the pace, the 
Duchess was to the fore where things were worst, 
carrying with her a group of her best nurses to plant 
down where they were most shockingly needed, and 
herself going for an incredible number of hours with- 
out food or rest. 

On one occasion, in the summer of 19 17, we took in 
at Villa Trento an overflow of fifty patients from the 
British army hospital then established for General 
Hamilton's newly-arrived batteries. I remember being 



io6 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

struck by the difference on entering our " Garibaldi 
Ward '* on the first day that it contained British ; every 
one on that day was reading something, whether book 
or newspaper. The Italian soldier, on the other hand, 
generally prefers to lie still, quietly happy in a com- 
fortable bed and the sense of companionship around. 
On the days for evacuating groups of patients there were 
heartrending scenes ; some who had been with us awhile 
were desolated at having to depart, and in the literal 
sense of the words, *' lifted up their voices and wept." 
Often when they got to the base hospital and finally to 
their own home, simple peasants once more, but too 
often now lacking an arm or a leg, they would write or 
cause to be written letters, or whole series of letters, of 
gratitude and affection to the " Signorine Inglesi " who 
had tended them so devotedly at Villa Trento. 

Our Allies appreciated the close individual attention 
in nursing, and the atmosphere of ** home " which we 
did our best to create for our patients in the fine old 
villa and shady grounds assigned to us. Our Italian 
medical chiefs. General Bonomo, Inspector-General of 
Hospitals at the front ; General Angelantonio, Medical 
Director of the Second Army ; and Colonels Morino 
and Santucci, Medical Directors of our Army Corps, 
and subsequently of the Second and Third Armies 



VILLA TRENTO FIELD HOSPITAL. 107 

respectively, were deeply interested in our hospital and 
most generous in their praise of it. 

Of Colonel Morino I have spoken already. Of 
Colonel (now General) Santucci it is difficult for me 
to speak, I owe him so much gratitude, and feel for 
him so much affection. Second to none in the Italian 
army as an organizer of their gigantic and carefully- 
systematized medical service, he was from his heart 
outwards the friend of England, with unshakable faith 
in the issue of the war so long as England and Italy 
held together. Always thinking of our work and inter- 
ests, whether as regards the ambulances or the hospital, 
he was to me the very embodiment of the spirit of the 
entente between the two countries, and of the finest and 
most solid Italian enthusiasm for the ideal side of the 
common cause. In the ever-recurring seasons of dis- 
appointed hopes and unexpected disasters, when Rumania 
fell, and whenever Russia failed, nothing did me more 
good than either to see General Santucci draw himself 
up with his good eyes kindling, and wave his hand say- 
ing, " Ho grande fiducia^^^ or else to see Sir Alexander 
Ogston smile as he smoked his pipe. They were two 
different ways of expressing the same idea. But did 
either of those optimists dream of anything like this 
wonderful ending ? 



io8 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Besides our nurses at Villa Trento, there were two 
groups of ladies who played a remarkable part on the 
Italian front in 19 16-17 — ^^^ Radiographic Unit of 
Countess Helena Gleichen and Mrs. Nina HoUings, and 
Mrs. Watkins and her " canteen " ladies. There was 
no more characteristic sight on the roads than the radio- 
graphic cars being driven by Mrs. HoUings and Countess 
Gleichen from hospital to hospital at the front.* And 
England was equally well represented by the other ladies 
who served that Unit during the great Italian offensives 
of 19 17, whether in their shell-battered house in Gorizia 
or in the safer but more romantic railway tunnel in 
Plava gorge. 

The Radiographic Unit did a great deal of valuable 
work where it was most needed. But Mrs. Watkins's 
contribution to the cause was of no less practical service. 
Canteens for the wounded passing through had been 
set up in the principal railway stations throughout the 
Peninsula by local Italian committees. But since there 
could be no local committee to set up a canteen at 
the railheads on the Isonzo front, Cervignano, and 



* We had a fixed radiographic plant at Villa Trento, but the 
ladies' 4th or Radiographic B.R.C. Unit was mobile, and went the 
round of the Italian field hospitals, which, especially near the front, 
seldom had a plant of their own. In other zones of the war the Italian 
Red Cross had similar mobile radiographic cars working. 



GORIZIA DURING THE OCCUPATION. 109 

San Giovanni Manzano,* Mrs. Watkins and a band of 
English ladies undertook the work there. But Mrs. 
Watkins*s influence went further than her canteen work. 
It was she who suggested and who helped General 
Capello to set up the first of the Case del Soldato, or 
recreation huts for soldiers, which afterwards became 
so essential a part of the life of the forces in the field. 
The huts were from the first a work of the Italian army ; 
but Mrs. Watkins 's part in the originating of the move- 
ment should stand on record. 

Gorizia was a health and pleasure resort of the 
Austrian military and bureaucratic classes, lying in a 
mild climate,f on a little plain through which the blue 
Isonzo rushes out from the iron gateway of Sabotino and 
San Gabriele. Overlooked by those twin gaunt giants 
Gorizia is even more closely dominated by the lower 
more comfortable heights of Podgora and San Marco. 
The Italians now held Sabotino and Podgora ; but the 
Austrians were firm on San Gabriele and San Marco, 
their positions on the latter being in some places not a 



* See Map II. 

t Hence there are many more villas and places of residence round 
Gorizia than round Trieste, which, as I discovered in the happier 
winter of 1918, is blown over perpetually by the cold Bora, and boasts 
as uninviting a winter climate as Edinburgh. 



no SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR 

kilometre from the heart of the town, which was only 
to some very slight extent protected by the ancient castle 
on its hilltop.* Such, from August 1916 to September 
1917, remained the position. When, in 1917, British 
officers began to visit or serve on the Italian front more 
frequently than before, I had often the pleasure of taking 
one or another of them up the Oslavia road to show them 
the view. When they saw it they were always amazed 
at the exposed position which the Italians in Gorizia 
were making good, with enemy heights rising straight 
up from the feet of their outposts, and a rapid river 
behind perpetually beating on their shelled pontoons. 

In these circumstances the year of occupation was 
one long bombardment and a series of fierce infantry 
struggles for the heights beyond the town. San Marco's 
woods, which had waved green welcome when we 
entered Gorizia in August 1916, disappeared as Pod- 
gora woods had disappeared before them, and soon the 
crests of San Marco shone in the distant view, bare and 
red as Podgora ridge itself. If on any one occasion in the 
year's fighting the Austrians on San Marco had been 
able to advance a kilometre, M&y would have retaken 
the town and put the Italians into the river. The fight- 
ing for Santa Caterina, the offshoot of San Gabriele, 

* See Map VI. 



GORIZIA DURING THE OCCUPATION, in 

above Salcano village, was scarcely less frequent and 
bitter, and equally barren of result. 

Until the Russian defection in the summer of 19 17 
gradually turned the tables, the Italians in Gorizia had 
the preponderance of artillery. They brought their guns 
up not only to Podgora and Sabotino, but over the river 
into the town itself. Gorizia and its pleasant villa 
suburbs were honeycombed with batteries that barked 
and roared night after night. The guns were packed 
so closely that they were often near enough to the hos- 
pitals and dressing-stations to offer some excuse for the 
destruction by enemy bombardment of one after another 
of the sanctuaries protected by the Red Cross sign. On 
those occasions, as we witnessed, the Italian medical 
officers by their example inspired their men with a calm- 
ness which enabled the evacuation to take place in per- 
fect order. The maintenance of regular field hospitals 
in Gorizia itself, only two kilometres from the enemy's 
lines, was a feature in the Italian medical policy differ- 
ing, I believe, from the practice in some other armies. 
It enabled first-class surgical operations to be carried 
out at the front at the price for the wounded of an 
appreciable amount more of danger and disturbance 
from the bombardment. There was clear loss and 
clear gain. 



112 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Since, however, no corner of the city and suburbs 
was safe, it was desirable to move across the river to 
safety, at the earliest possible moment, all those patients 
whom the doctors did not decide to keep in the hospitals. 
We therefore took up quarters for our ambulances in 
Gorizia, so as to be at the beck and call of the dressing- 
stations by night and day. Our main establishment was 
a large house on the northern outskirts of the town 
(No. 1 6 via Ponte Isonzo), looking up a pleasant grove 
and garden to San Gabriele, but screened from view of 
the Austrians there by some fine old chestnut trees, 
beneath which we parked our cars. Here we spent a 
busy and romantic year. 

One night early in December 1916 a shell broke in the 
wall of the room where our night drivers slept. Three 
of the four were out on service over the bridges, and so 
escaped the fate of their beds ; one of the three, Phil 
Arundel, has since been killed as a flying man in France, 
and another, Lionel Sessions, afterwards lost his leg in 
our service. But the fourth occupant of the room, 
Hamish Allan, was in bed, and was severely wounded. 
After that we constructed a fine dug-out beside the 
house, in which we took great pride as the work of our 
own hands and of our scanty leisure. The design, how- 
ever, was not entirely our own ; for we profited by the 



GORIZIA DURING THE OCCUPATION. 113 

technical advice of an Italian officer of genio, who looked 
in on us one day, and, after reviewing the dug-out as we 
were then constructing it, remarked, " There are two 
sorts of dug-outs— a dug-out to live in, and a dug-out to 
die in. This is a dug-out to die in." 

One day some of us were royally entertained at lunch 
by the officers of the 24th Sezione Sanita in Gorizia. 
After the Intesa toasts in Asti, they brought in a very 
fat common soldier, who without preface burst into 
song — Verdi's " Otello " — ^with a baritone voice as power- 
ful as Plunkett Greene's, and of marvellous beauty. In 
the little dining-room it seemed to endanger the stability 
of the walls. We hurriedly opened the windows, and 
it drowned the cannon which were roaring in the garden 
fifty yards away. It was one of the most surprising 
scenes at which I have ever attended. He sings in the 
great opera houses in Italy, thereby corresponding in 
popular position to the Matador in Spain, and is now 
a common soldier in the Sanita. My experience is that 
ordinary Italian voices when singing are more discordant 
than ordinary English voices, but that there are a large 
number of voices of this baritone type in Italy which 
for volume and beauty are absolutely unmatched in 
England. 

The training that such voices undergo for the severe 

(2,041) 8 



114 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

purpose of classical Italian opera is analogous to the 
training of professional athletes in England. The popu- 
lar interest in the opera, which would bore an English 
audience to tears, is very genuine and very remarkable. 
There is comparatively little corresponding in Italy to 
the song-books of England or of Scotland, either to the 
beautiful and serious repertory of times gone by or to 
the music hall and revue choruses of to-day. But the 
classical opera is a national passion. In July 1918 the 
staff of the nth Division, which we had served in the 
battle of the previous month, invited some of us to their 
divisional theatre, where, every night so long as the 
division was in riposo, men and officers entertained their 
comrades. And how did they entertain them } Mainly 
by excellent renderings of the most famous passages from 
the operas of Verdi and Rossini. Our hosts told us 
that they had taken the idea of a divisional theatre from 
a British division with whom they had fraternized on 
the Asiago plateau.* But I am sure the British divi- 
sional theatre had a very different and more variegated 
programme. Suum cuique tributo. 

Our own life in Gorizia during that winter of 19 16, 

* The teatro del soldato had been started here and there on the old 
Isonzo front shortly before the Retreat. But that was run by artists 
imported from Italy. The nth Division's theatre was run by the 
soldiers of the division themselves. 



GORIZIA DURING THE OCCUPATION. 115 

as at all other times, was cheerful and interesting enough ; 
but for the povero fante^ the patient Italian infantryman, 
life was becoming a sordid and weary misery. Here was 
the second winter spent by him far away from his beloved 
family and farm in the hollow of the Apennine or in the 
rich alluvial plain, spent by him in slavelike drudgery 
amid damp trenches and grimy ruins, for a cause that 
had never been intelligibly explained to him by the 
book-learned who had dragged him from his home. 
The bright hopes of victory held out in the early autumn 
by the taking of Gorizia, the Russian victories, and the 
entry of Rumania, had ended in the dismal Russian 
Betrayal No. i. 

About this time Mr. Lloyd George made his famous 
speech in which the war was likened unto a sporting 
prize fight. The figure pleased not the Italians, other- 
wise well content with our new Premier. Now it 
chanced that we had in the Unit some ambulances 
generously provided by the Sportsman's Fund, Presi- 
dent Lord Lonsdale. This fact was properly painted 
in large letters on the bodies of the cars. More than 
one Italian came up to us in Gorizia that winter to 
complain of the brave inscription. " Oh yes ! Lloyd 
George has said so. You English think this war is 
sport ! " In vain we discoursed on the various mean- 



ii6 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

ings of the word '* sport," and the particular character 
of the Sportsman's Fund. No ; it was an offence. Even 
on our ambulances we announced to our too patient 
allies that the war was sport ! 

One excellent feature of the Italian occupation of 
Gorizia was the treatment of civilians who still insisted 
on clinging to their homes in spite of the bombardment. 
It is arguable that they should all have been removed ; 
there were a fair number of casualties, and almost cer- 
tainly some who remained were spies. But since it was 
decided that they might stay, it was well that every- 
thing was done to render their life supportable. The 
Italian military authorities supplied them with food, 
and enabled them to get down periodically to Udine to 
market. We helped to supply clothes to the civilians,^ 
especially to the children ; and this first brought Geoffrey 
Young, who had the matter in hand, into contact with 
the most notable civilian in Gorizia, Sister Matilda at 
the convent. Several hundred children came there every 
day for food and schooling, and some resided there alto- 
gether. Their happy child's life went on during day 
after day of the wrath of man, subterraneously in time 
of danger, at other times emerging into the courtyards 
of the gradually crumbling convent. I never met a 
finer woman than Sister Matilda, or a wiser. She took 



"CECCO BEPPE." 117 

her part in this world and was shrewd in her judgments 
of it, yet she moved " above the milee.^^ When finally, 
late in 19 17, they took the children from her and sent 
them to Leghorn, it seemed a cruel necessity, but neces- 
sary indeed it was, for the building was being hit every 
day. She remained on among the ruins, and we found 
her there still, serene and practical as ever, when we re- 
turned on the tide of final victory in November 1918. 

In the early part of the winter of 19 16-17 *^^ Em- 
peror Francis Joseph, known to every Italian as *' Cecco 
Beppe," died on the precarious throne which he had 
occupied for all but seventy years. Called to the uneasy 
heritage in 1848, when the old Austrian Empire of Met- 
ternich was in actual dissolution, and only Radetzky's 
army stood firm, he had, contrary to expectation, and 
contrary to the world's true interest, succeeded by no 
little valour and wisdom in holding together, first under 
German- Austrian, and then under German and Magyar 
tyranny, all those peoples, nations, and languages. This 
artificial structure, full seventy years too old, now 
depended for a further lease of life on Prussia's victory 
in the world contest. One is glad that the old man did 
not live to see the fall. 

The feeling against " Cecco Beppe " in Italy was 
personal. He was the man of whom their fathers had 



ii8 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

told them. His soldiers had hunted Garibaldi and Anita 
in the marshes ; his armies had held insolent sway in 
half the fairest cities of Italy ; his hangmen had hung 
the martyrs ; and, since the union of Italy, his officials 
had persecuted their brothers of the lands still un- 
redeemed. So when the old man died there was no 
pretence of any feeling but satisfaction. 

From that moment forward one noticed a further 
shifting of Italian hatred from Austria to Germany, 
from the mask to the face behind it. It is true that 
this change was hastened by many other causes besides 
the old Emperor's death ; indeed, Italy had declared 
war on Germany before he died. But the traditional 
feeling against " Cecco Beppe " could not be transferred 
to " Carlo and Zita ; " the young couple were good- 
humouredly despised or pitied, never hated. I remem- 
ber, for instance, a mural monument which the Austrians 
had erected near their dug-outs on Oslavia hill. After 
its capture in August 191 6 the Italians had decorated it 
with a portrait of " Cecco Beppe " as the deuce. But 
later on, after his death, the pictured fiend took on the 
likeness of a Prussian in his spiked helmet. During 
19 17 mural decoration at the front became more and 
more anti- German. One house in a village of the plain 
was illuminated on the wall facing the street by an 



VENICE DURING THE WAR. 119 

enormous fresco of a cloaked Prussian figure cutting off 
the hands of a Belgian child. What was more impor- 
tant, patriotic talk ran more and more on anti- German 
lines, based on a broader understanding of the world 
struggle against the spirit of military despotism. With 
this went a better understanding of England's part and 
policy. 

During the winter of 19 16-17 I composed a lecture 
on Garibaldi which was translated into very choice 
Italian by my friend Major Lionello De Lisi, whose 
medical science is adorned by his literary gifts and lofty, 
patriotic enthusiasm. I gave our lecture first to the 
officers in Udine, at the invitation of the Comando Su- 
premo ; then to mixed civil and military audiences in 
Milan, Treviso, and Venice. At Venice, being the guest 
of Professor Pietro Orsi and the Athenaeum, I got an in- 
side view of some of the leading patriotic families of the 
*' home front," and of the remarkable civic life of the 
Queen of the Waters. As we shouldered our way through 
the narrow Merceria, Orsi said to me that the absence of 
horses and carriages had made Venice more equalitarian 
than any other city in Italy. Since riding horses were 
forbidden in 1300 a.d., the leading citizens and their 
wives have always had to rub shoulders with the crowd. 

The Venetians were very valiant and patriotic. 



I20 SCENES FROM ITALY^S WAR. 

though the war hit them harder than any one else in 
Italy. With their port closed and the forestieri away 
fighting each other, their two main occupations were 
gone. But Venice had risen to meet her own needs. 
A Citizens' Committee, of which my hosts were active 
members, had in good time procured vast war orders 
from Government of the kind that could be done in 
Venice, and had distributed the work and the requisite 
raw material among the small workshops and private 
houses of the popolani. Woodwork for shell cases and 
barrows, soldiers' clothing, small iron work and children's 
toys, to replace the German, were the chief. The Citi- 
zens' Committee had also set up a scientifically-managed 
relief system, and a distribution of milk for infants. 
Largely in consequence of this organized mutual aid, 
Venice had a finer feeling of patriotic fellowship, and was 
more ready to go on with the war than other cities whose 
industries were far less crippled, or had even been 
stimulated by the fact of the war. I came away from 
that visit with an historic sense of the undying spirit 
of Venetian democracy and fellow-citizenship with which 
Manin had worked his miracles. 

During the same winter, the Commissioner, Lord 
Monson, brought round Mr. E. V. Lucas to see the 
British Red Cross work in Italy. The visit pleased and 



THE CARSO. 121 

encouraged us, and resulted in a characteristically 
delightful and kindly tractate on our work, entitled, 
" Outposts of Mercy." 

The road to Trieste, chosen as the principal battle- 
field on which Italy and Austria wore down each other's 
*' will to resist," in the continuous and bloody warfare 
of 191 5-17, was divided into two parts — ^the Plava- 
Gorizia zone to the north, and the Carso to the south. 
Our Unit did no service on the Carso, but in the year 
191 7 I paid several visits to that strange land, some- 
times to Italian friends, sometimes to Mr, Alexander's 
Third B.R.C. Unit, and sometimes to the officers of 
General Hamilton's batteries. 

The Carso is a world by itself. It is limestone 
tableland, lying between the Gorizia valley and the sea, 
and stretching along the coast beyond Trieste. Its sides 
facing north and west are partly wooded, but the table- 
land itself has no vegetation higher than grass and 
stunted brushwood. The earth is red, the limestone 
white ; in winter these are the two colours of the Carso, 
but in summer an outcrop of green grass completes the 
Italian tricolour. The sparse villages, all ruined and 
unroofed by the war, each visible for miles away on 
that high, flat wilderness, were inhabited in peace time by 



122 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

herdsmen, for the patches of grass are good pasturage 
in spring. Indeed, our South Africans compared the 
Carso to the veldt. 

To me, as a North Englander, the character of the 
ground at close quarters recalled the top of the limestone 
scars of Yorkshire and Westmorland, only, instead of 
being, like Whitbarrow, a mile across and a few miles 
long, the Carso is seven miles across and more than 
twenty long. Indeed, the more distant view, with the 
illimitable desert spaces rising into low hills far away, 
was like a Scotch or Northumbrian moor stript of bent 
and heather, if such a monstrosity can be conceived. 

But the native peculiarity of the Carso was the doline, 
or cup-shaped hollows, each twenty, fifty, or more yards 
across, said to have been worn by the action of water 
collected for ages in the flat limestone surface. In these 
hollows, which were counted by the hundred, men, huts, 
and guns were hidden away by both sides, so that when 
half a million soldiers were inhabiting that uncanny 
wilderness, it looked more deserted than in peace time, 
and yet no available cover was to be seen. Nothing, 
in fact, was visible except the ruins of the villages, the 
screening of the roads, the stone walls raised by the 
shepherds, and an occasional car scudding swift and 
silent across the ominous ambushed desert where 



THE CARSO. 123 

Browning's Childe Roland might well have found 
the Tower. 

Over this terrible land, from June 19 15 to October 
1 9 17, the Third Army, under the Duke of Aosta, won 
its way, yard by yard. The Carso yields as little shade 
or water as the Sahara, and its splintering rock doubled 
the effect of every shell. Those can judge best of 
Italy's effort who walk over that ground, as they now 
safely may, viewing line after line of broken wire en- 
tanglements, and of trenches blasted out in the rock 
surface and then blown to pieces by bombardment. 

The Italian advance progressed farthest along the 
northern edge of the Carso, overlooking Gorizia, till 
finally, from well beyond Faiti, the rear of the enemy's 
San Marco position could be enfiladed.* But to 
the south, along the sea coast, progress beyond Mon- 
falcone was well-nigh physically impossible, though 
it was desperately attempted in the summer of 19 17. 
For here the steep Hermada, or hill of Medeazza, 
blocked the coast road to Trieste. Across the western 
approach to Hermada, as if by a prevision on nature's 
part of Austria's needs in this war, stretched a reedy 
marshland, lying between the Carso and the sea, pass- 
able only by narrow causeways and long wooden foot- 

* For this paragraph see Map VI., p. 97 above. 



124 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

bridges over the sullen water. Any one viewing the 
region wonders not why the Italians failed to establish 
themselves on Hermada, but how they at any time 
succeeded in crossing the marsh.* 

In the spring of 1917 the British batteries, under 
General Hamilton, arrived on the Italian front, the first 
combatant troops of any Allied Power. Their guns at 
one moment rose to the number of sixty-four. By that 
time the French also had batteries in the zone of Gorizia 
and the Middle Isonzo ; but the British batteries always 
served the Third Army, some of them being placed in 
doline on the Carso tableland, and others, more fortunate 
in the heat of the summer, on the banks of the Vipacco 
where it flows deep, a joy to bathers, through the fertile 
country below the northern edge of the Carso. As the 
season advanced, General Hamilton put his men into 
slouch hats of the Colonial type as a protection against 
the sun ; they never appeared in the sun helmets that 
distinguished Lord Cavan's army in Italy in the follow- 
ing year. They got on very well with the Italians. 
Politically as well as militarily the experiment was a 
decided success, and if the unity of front had been 



* It was in the great Italian offensive here in May- June, 19 17, 
that Mr. Davis of the 3rd B.R.C. Unit was killed in Monfalcone, leav- 
ing a memory very pleasant to his comrades. 



THE BRITISH BATTERIES. 125 

complete, might have encouraged the Allies to send 
some English and French divisions to aid the push on 
Bainsizza that autumn. But the German divisions came 
instead. Otherwise it is possible that instead of Capo- 
retto we might have had the crumbling of Austria-Hun- 
gary at the end of 19 17 instead of a year later. Many 
thought this at the time ; and from all that we have learnt 
now that the armistice has lifted the veil on the internal 
condition of the enemy countries, they may think so 
more strongly than before. But for good or for ill the 
fates had willed it otherwise, perhaps for the more com- 
plete final discomfiture of the Dynasts. Before the 
triumphant close, a huge and terrible Fourth Act of the 
drama had yet to be played, searching the souls of men 
and nations, and teaching us children of earth to — 

" let determined things to destiny 
Hold unbewailed their way." 



CHAPTER VI. 

The great Italian offensives from Piava and Gorizia, May and August- 
September 1917 — Kuk, Santo, Bainsizza, San Gabriele — The 
Itahan high- water mark reached. 

|N May 19 17 the long Isonzo gorge stretching from 
Tolmino to the Gorizia plain still divided the oppos- 
ing armies, except for the Italian tSte-de~pont at Plava 
and the Austrian tite-de-pont at Santa Lucia, farther 
north. The gorge was contained on the Italian side by 
one long, unbroken ridge, from two to three thousand 
feet in height, and largely clothed with oak woods. The 
ridge began at the southern end with Monte Sabotino, 
went on with Monte Planina and Monte Corada above 
the Plava bottom, turned sharply westward at the heights 
whence one looked down into the deserted streets of 
Tolmino, and finally dropped through steep forests into 
Caporetto. Before the summer of 19 17 the genio had 
completed a vast system of high-level roads from Sabo- 
tino to Caporetto along the top of this ridge and a whole 
network behind and athwart it. By means of these 



PREPARATIONS ALONG THE RIDGE. 127 

smooth and well-graded mountain roads hundreds of 
heavy cannon were placed along the ridge that summer, 
destined to blow the Austrians out of their positions 
beyond the Isonzo gorge, but too many doomed after 
that to be left behind in their mountain emplacements 
in the great Retreat. 

Besides our work in Gorizia and Plava, our Unit 
had out-stations of ambulances on this ridge near Liga 
and ICambresko, as well as down in Caporetto itself. 
Driving that summer along that new high-level road 
with plain and sea and distant Western Alps in view on 
one side, and on the other the Isonzo gorge and the 
enemy heights beyond, on to which we were soon to 
cross, was the most exhilarating of all our customary 
routes. For not only was Nature seen in every direc- 
tion in her most majestic aspects, whether of mountain, 
plain, or sea, but along the road itself one was in the 
very heart of preparations for a mighty effort of human 
skill and purpose, to which the keen upland air 
seemed to impart its own energy. Wooden baracche 
were rising tier above tier on the steepest parts 
of the mountain where the angle gave most pro- 
tection from bombardment ; here huts were being 
built out on platforms over the yawning chasm of a 
precipice round which the roadside curled ; there yet 



128 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

another battery was being placed under a grove of 
chestnut trees. 

In this busy and exalted region we became associated 
with the 4th Bersagliere Regiment, under Colonel Gotti, 
during the operations of the spring of 19 17. Our first 
hope was that we should cross the Isonzo with them 
above Canale, where it was rumoured that the main 
operation of the coming offensive would take place ; 
we had our plans ready for an advance down the lanes 
on the side of the great gorge. But when the May 
offensive began, it soon turned out that the attack of 
the Bersaglieri above Canale was only a feint, which 
they performed, indeed, with daring, skill, and success, 
throwing across footbridges under a heavy fire, and 
driving the enemy up the steep mountains on the farther 
shore. But then, to their intense chagrin, they were 
recalled, because the real blow was being delivered against 
Monte Kuk from Plava, whither our ambulances had 
been transferred. 

I have described earlier * the extraordinary position 
of the tete-de-pont beyond the Isonzo at Plava, where 
the Italians maintained themselves from June 19 15 to 
May 1917 under every imaginable disadvantage ; how 

* See pp. 71-75 above. 



THE PLAVA-KUK BATTLE, MAY 1917. 129 

their trenches at Zagora ran athwart the steep slope of 
Monte Kuk, with the Austrian trenches a few yards 
above them ; how all their stores had to be carried 
across the shelled pontoon bridge at Plava bottom at 
the only spot where the river could be crossed not actu- 
ally in sight of the Austrians ; and how Plava bottom 
itself could be reached by wheeled traffic only along a 
single narrow road from Verhovlje, closely overlooked 
from across the Isonzo by the Austrians on Monte Kuk. 
The failure of the offensive from Plava in August 
19 1 6 had been due partly to these local conditions and 
partly to want of co-ordination with the plans for the 
more successful attack on Gorizia.* In 1917 the forces 
of the Gorizia and Plava regions had been wisely united 
into one " Army of Gorizia," under General Capello. 
He and his Chief of Staff, General Badoglio, saw that 
the spell of chronic and now traditional failure of every 
effort to lift the Italians out of the hole that they were 
in at Plava on to the summit of Monte Kuk could be 
broken only by providing a second roadway down to 
the Plava bridgehead. On the existing exposed, one-way 
road from Verhovlje it was impossible to take down 
enough material for such an operation as the capture of 
Monte Kuk, still less of Monte Santo and the Bainsizza 

* See pp. 101-102 above. 

(2,041) Q 



MteCoiuU 




^ M. San Gabriele 

San Daniele 






.<!§ ' ■ • 



Map VII. — The OflFensive from Plava, May 191 7. 

(Italian line after the offensive is shaded. Before that it ran from near 
Globna to Zagora, where it fell into the river. The road of the '* thirty-two 
hairpins," coming down from Mte. Corada to Plava, was only completed 
early in May 1917.) 



THE PLAVA-KUK BATTLE, MAY 1917. 131 

beyond. The new road was opened only a few days 
before the May offensive began. It was generally spoken 
of as " Badoglio's road," but in our Unit we called it 
the road of " the thirty-two hairpins." It was a won- 
derful piece of engineering, but slow work for a car 
with a bad lock ! Henceforth lorries and ambulances 
came down to Plava bottom by the " thirty- two hair- 
pins " from Monte Corada in the north, and returned 
to the upper world again by the old narrow road to 
Verhovlje. This change more than doubled the amount 
of heavy material that could be brought by lorries and 
dumped at the Plava bridge for porterage. It also 
enabled the Italian and British ambulances to get many 
thousands of wounded away quickly during the battle. 

The new road came down through carefully-selected 
folds of the mountain side, and through forests that 
afforded considerable cover from the enemy. But the 
moment the cars came out into Plava bottom and ap- 
proached the bridge they were exposed to a heavy bar- 
rage by which the erkemy hoped to cut the slender 
communications of the new offensive. Several cars, 
including one of our ambulances, were completely 
destroyed. Indeed, it was a remarkable scene by night 
or day, in the narrow space near the pontoon bridge. 
Everything that fed the great battle on Monte Kuk, and 



132 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

all the returning wreckage of that fierce strife, had to 
pass and repass by mule or porterage over the string 
of boats swaying in the swift flood.* In the lee of a 
shattered house just above the bridge the wounded 
were laid out by scores at a time on their stretchers, 
waiting for the cars to carry them up out of the valley 
of death. Beside them in the narrow space, the war 
material brought down by the lorries was dumped in 
piles, picked up, and carried off over the pontoons. 
Above all this crush and confusion the enemy's shrapnel 
burst in periodic gusts of fury, striking the wounded 
where they lay, and rendering the unloading of the 
lorries and loading of the ambulances a task requiring 
the cool energy of the lieutenants and aspiranti (cadets) 
in charge of the operation. In these difficult moments 
the young officers gladly accepted the co-operation of 
Philip Baker, who had now permanently taken up his 
quarters in the valley bottom with the section of our cars 
under his command. In these days and nights of May 
we began to make many good friends down in Plava. 

Meanwhile, across the river the battle on Monte 
Kuk was speeding well. The sheer mountain side, 
unscaleable for two years, was falling at last. The 

* As the battle progressed another footbridge was thrown across 
opposite Zagora. 



THE CAPTURE OF MONTE KUK. 133 

Italian preliminary bombardment, like that on Sabotino 
the year before, destroyed in a few hours the Austrian 
wire and trenches. Then the infantry, launched to the 
assault, climbed straight up the steepest part of the 
long slope ; it was as though one should storm Bow Fell 
from Mickelden bottom in the face of machine guns 
and rifle fire of a determined enemy. Having reached 
the summit, they worked along the crest in a series of 
desperate engagements of attack and counter-attack. 
Every arm — infantry, geniOy artillery — vied in their zeal. 
A few days after its capture I saw on the top of Monte 
Kuk some Italian " seventy-fives " that had been dragged 
up. Heaven knows how, by sheer strength of arm and 
will during the mSlee itself. By May 22nd, after ten 
days' fighting as fierce as any in the war, not only Monte 
Kuk but the greater part of Vodice and the lower slopes 
of Monte Santo had been captured. 

It was now possible to repair and bring back into 
use the permanent Plava bridge, no longer in sight of 
the enemy. This relieved the dangerous congestion 
which I have described on the west bank of the Plava 
bottom, for wheeled traffic could now cross the Isonzo 
and even run for a few kilometres along the valley road 
at the bottom of the gorge that goes towards Gorizia 



134 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

between Monte Kuk and Monte Santo on one side, and 
Monte Sabotino on the other. Although the enemy 
were still on the summit of Monte Santo, the Italian 
line had been moved across the river the whole way 
from Salcano to Plava. 

It was while working on this road that we got our 
first complete view of the back of Sabotino. Its preci- 
pices that fall straight from the summit into the Isonzo 
waters are very different in character from the other 
side of the mountain, the smooth, sloping battlefield that 
we had watched so long from Quisca.* The limestone 
buttresses that washed their feet in the river were so 
steep that military operations on that face of Sabotino 
were out of the question. In the forests that clambered 
among these cliffs, too steep for man's abode or war- 
fare, some wild deer had maintained themselves for a year 
past, secure as in the Forest of Arden, yet all the while 
in the forefront of the battle-line. High over their heads 
the Italian cannon fired from the rock chambers of 
Sabotino, through windows pierced in its summit to 
command Kuk, Santo, and Gabriele. At night time 
that road along the gorge was full of wonder and of 



* See pp. 47-49 above. The Austrians, when they held Sabotino 
in 1915-16, had made a funicular up one of the gullies on the Isonzo 
face. It was visible in 1917. 



AFTER THE CAPTURE OF MONTE KUK. 135 

beauty: the pinnacles of Sabotino, far overhead among 
the stars, yet belching fire from mid-rock ; the invisible 
stream heard close at hand, the only voice in the valley ; 
the two noiseless hosts, a felt presence, unseen ; the 
searchlights shifting slow from mountain head to moun- 
tain head, now lighting Gabriele's bald sconce, now 
striking the last thin stick of ruined convent- on Monte 
Santo 's crest, throwing it out, dazzling white between 
black mountain and black sky, still erect and pointing, 
*' like death's lean lifted forefinger." 

The genio lost little time after the victory in May. 
Monte Kuk is steep and rugged, rising nearly 2,000 feet 
from the river ; but a few days after its capture the 
Italian water-pipes and teleferiche were supplying the 
needs of the troops on its summit, and in twenty-six 
days the genio had constructed from base to crest of the 
mountain a winding road of seven kilometres, with per- 
fect gradient and surface, at the cost of several hundred 
casualties among the roadmakers. Less than a month 
after the battle had given the roadless mountain side to 
the Italians, their heavy guns were going up by tractor 
to emplacements on the top ; while lorries with military 
stores, and our ambulances bringing down the wounded, 
were passing and repassing on the road to the crest of 
Monte Kuk. At the same time the perforatrici (machine 



136 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

drills) were everywhere hollowing out new caverns in 
the mountain side and along the river bank, making 
life every day a little safer on the newly-conquered 
ground, in spite of the increasing volume of artillery 
fire due to the constant transfer of enemy guns that 
summer from the crumbling Russian front. Without 
the Kuk road and the machine drills the maintenance of 
the new positions, let alone the advance over Bainsizza 
in the autunm, would have been utterly impossible. 

At the same time the old Verhovlje road was broad- 
ened ; a fine new road was made from the north-west 
end of Sabotino to join the river road below Zagora ; and 
yet another new road was constructed forwards from 
Plava up the pass at Palliovo to a point just short of 
what was then the new Italian line. All this work, 
besides the making of the new trenches and gun emplace- 
ments, was accomplished in two months within a single 
area of a few kilometres from Plava. I doubt whether 
any other army would have done as much work in the 
same time and space. 

While Young continued in Gorizia with half our 
ambulances, Philip Baker had during the May battle 
taken up quarters in Plava bottom with the other half.* 

* Our First Unit ambulances now numbered between thirty and 
forty. We were replaced at Caporetto this summer by the Second 
B.R.C. Unit, under Mr. Sargant, which also worked in Carnia. 



AFTER THE CAPTURE OF MONTE KUK. 137 

It was always difficult to find within a mile of Plava a 
flat bit of ground that was not either shelled too many 
times a day, or had not already been occupied by some 
one else. We managed, however, to park our cars near 
the great railway viaduct at the foot of the little Val 
Grune, where its stream debouches from the woodland 
steeps into the Isonzo. There we pitched our tent and 
secured also a wooden hut for use by day ; but we 
slept in the rocks above in a shepherd's grotto shared 
with some Italian friends, as the bottom of the dell was 
searched by shells every night. 

During that strange summer the remote and unin- 
habited Val Grune was as busy as a London street. The 
foot and mule traffic came down that way from Monte 
Planina ; and under the railway arches the prisoners 
were collected as they came in from across the Isonzo, 
before being marched off through the woods overhead. 
Here we had our advanced quarters from May till we 
went on to the Bainsizza late in August, and even then 
we retained our hut and tent as an intermediate base 
until the Retreat two months later. After the year of 
exile on the Piave had gone by, I revisited the Isonzo 
gorge one day in November 191 8, to say to those remem- 
bered scenes Hail and Farewell ! The once so busy 
banks by Plava bridge had fallen still and silent. The 



138 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

fever of war had passed away, leaving the valley dead. 
The sadness of the ruined houses of Plava village, never 
felt during the lively scenes and doings of the former 
year, oppressed the soul now that all was empty and 
desolate. But in the Val Grune, the solitary dell where 
no house had ever stood, it was a relief to see the reign 
of Nature restored. Only some military litter round 
our decaying hut gave proof of man's brief, incongruous 
irruption into the dreaming vale, where the winter 
woods rose tier above tier in beauty regnant once more. 
Man's presence is doubtless an improvement upon earth, 
but in some places it is very nice when he goes away. 

In the three months between the battles of May and 
of August 19 17, we saw much at Plava and Gorizia of 
the Italian officers, with whom comradeship in recent 
events had made us more than ever intimate. The 
advanced clearing station in the rock gallery, hollowed 
out at the base of Plava hill, where a hundred and fifty 
patients could lie in perfect safety and considerable 
comfort, was the base to which we now carried back 
the wounded from the front. The dominating genius 
of the place was ,Major Scarsella, in charge of the Sezione 
Sanita. Under his individual rule and inspiration Plava 
became, not only a great place for work, but in the 
intervals of war a social centre as congenial and amusing 



AFTER THE CAPTURE OF MONTE KUK. 139 

as any to which it has been my fortune to be made 
welcome. 

At that time I was deeply interested in the prepara- 
tions of America for serious entry into the war which 
she had proclaimed against Germany. The " enrolling " 
on June 5th of so many millions over there without a 
hitch seemed to me an event of infinite moment and 
promise. But I found that my Italian friends did not 
yet believe in America. The officers had fewer ties 
with the great Republic than the men, as the Italian 
emigration to North America is almost wholly of the 
less-educated class. Neither had America yet declared 
war on Austria, or shown any interest in Italy. It was 
mainly to England that the Italian War Party still looked. 
My enthusiastic asseverations that Mr. Wilson and his 
fellow-citizens were preparing to go fino in fondo were 
received by my Italian friends in kindly but obvi- 
ously incredulous silence. It is interesting to recall this 
now, because in 191 8 America came to loom almost 
unnaturally large in the Italian eye. But in 19 17 it was 
not so, and when, therefore, the Russians failed again, 
the discouragement was the greater. Many began to 
see little chance of winning the war, as week after week 
during that summer and autumn more and more Austrian 
batteries and battalions gave evidence of their arrival 



I40 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

from the Russian front. But in spite of all this, the 
finest effort of the Italian army was made in the last 
half of August and the first half of September 19 17. 
It was only after that magnificent and largely successful 
effort had proved inconclusive that the fruits of dis- 
couragement were reaped in late October. 

The month of the most continuously fierce fighting 
in the whole Italian war opened on August 18, 1917, 
with a general bombardment from Tolmino to the sea. 
The guns massed along the Corada ridge searched the 
Austrian positions beyond the Isonzo. Next day, along 
the front from Plava northwards to Doblar, the infantry 
bridged and crossed the rapid river in face of the enemy, 
and began to ascend the eastern bank of the gorge. 
A more difficult operation, in face of machine-gun posts 
and a determined foe entrenched in ground of such 
vantage, has seldom been allotted to any force in the 
world war. Here and there a politically weak link in 
the enemy armour, like the Czechs on Monte Jelenik, 
rendered a general success just possible. Gradually, 
as day followed day of carnage, point after point was 
won. The high-lying hamlet of Vrh fell, and Hill 711, 
keys to a whole region. Near Plava, operations began 
with a false attack on Monte Santo to the south, while 




5 & 

i 1 Miles 



Map VIII. — Taking of the Bainsizza Plateau, Aug. -Sept. 191 7. 

(The whole region to north and south of Bate is called the 
Bainsizza Plateau.) 



142 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

to the north the foot of the Rohot valley was seized. 
As we ran our cars up and down the road between Plava 
and the debouchment of that stream, we saw the line 
of the battle overhead getting nearer and nearer to the 
top of Jelenik, till at last it had completely fallen. The 
Czech prisoners came pouring down the heights into 
Plava, men whom we were to see again next year in 
Italian uniforms, with their national colours mounted 
on the Alpino hat, playing a great part in the Allies' 
*' peace offensive," and no mean part in Italy's war. 

But far to northward there was a serious set back. 
The attempt to turn from the south the positions of 
the enemy in the Santa Lucia and Tolmino region was 
held to be so important that General Badoglio himself 
had charge of that operation.* But the Austrians could 
not be dislodged from their fastness round Lom pro- 
tected by the steep banks of the Vogercek torrent. By 
this failure the strategic way was left open for the disaster 
of Caporetto. 

The fall of Jelenik was followed on the 23rd and 
24th of August by the decisive battle on Vodice and 

* Badoglio was now put in coonmand of the 2nd Army Corps. He 
had been Capello's Chief of Staff when Capello commanded the Gorizia 
(and Plava) army in May 19 17. Now the Gorizia army was merged 
in the larger Second Army (including the 2nd Army Corps) ; this 
army took in the Santa Lucia and Caporetto regions, and was placed 
under Capello's command. 



THE BAINSIZZA OFFENSIVE. 143 

Kobilek, which opened out the ItaHan advance over the 
south of the Bainsizza plateau, as the victory on Jelenik 
had already opened it out over the part to the north. 
On the crest and flanks of Vodice both sides had been 
entrenched at close quarters ever since the battle in 
May. The hero of Vodice was the fine old soldier, 
General Prince Gonzaga. He combined a complete 
control of the operations of his Division with a boyish 
enjoyment of danger, a perpetual appearance on the top 
of the disputed mountain and a gaiety which won the 
hearts of his soldiers and of all who came near him. 
On the 24th of August he and his troops had the reward 
of their long vigil ; the whole system of Austrian trenches 
running from the farther part of Vodice round the head 
of the Robot valley on to Kobilek itself, after being 
subjected to a destructive bombardment, was stormed 
in the grand style. 

Once this obstacle was passed, the pursuit went 
raging over the Bainsizza plateau with the dash char- 
acteristic of the Italians whenever they are well led. 
Part of the enemy were driven steeply down into the 
Gargaro valley and chased along it to the northern foot 
of San Gabriele. Monte Santo was turned, surrounded, 
and forced to surrender ; at long last the " red, white, 
and green " waved over the ruined convent on the 



144 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

summit, that Italian eyes had gazed on so enviously 
for two long years.* 

Farther to the north the conquerors of Kobilek, 
sweeping across the valley in which Ravne village lies, 
mounted the limestone crags of the heights beyond, 
which might have been easily defended, and had, indeed, 
been prepared for defence, but were carried in that first 
triumphant rush. On the afternoon of the 24th of 
August, standing on a line of trenches near Vodice in 
which the Austrians had been that morning. Baker and 
I saw a little string of men, black against the white 
limestone, struggling up those heights beyond Ravne, 
three miles away as the crow flies. At first we thought 
they were retreating Austrians, but presently, when the 
batteries on Ternovo began to shell them, we realized 
that they were the Italians who had a few hours before 
stormed the ground we stood on, and were now ranging 
over hill and valley like hounds on the trail. The string of 
men soon disappeared over the mountain top, where they 
and their comrades established on the far side the farthest 
line that Italy ever reached before the great Retreat. 



* See frontispiece. Monte Santo used to be visible against the 
sky-line not only from near Gorizia in 1916, but from Quisca in 1915, 
over the shoulder of Sabotino. When we first saw it there was a fine 
group of buildings on the top, but before it was taken these had become 
by successive stages a heap of rubble. 



THE BAINSIZZA OFFENSIVE. 145 

It was clear that two or three days must elapse before 
wheeled traffic could follow the infantry beyond Vodice. 
The excellent road made by the genio that summer led 
up from Zagora as far as the Pass 524 (metres) between 
Vodice and Kuk, to which point ambulances and lorries 
as well as artillery and carts freely came ; but beyond 
this pass-top, on the recent No Man's Land, and the 
scene of so much long and fierce fighting, the old Aus- 
trian road had disappeared entirely from sight in a wil- 
derness of trenches, counter- trenches, and shell craters. 
Already, indeed, the deft genio were at work to link up 
the rest of the army with the vanguard who had gone on 
across the Bainsizza, but it was not to be done in a day. 

Returning down to the Isonzo gorge, we went that 
night by the long-deserted river road to Salcano and 
Gorizia to exchange news with Young and our drivers 
there. The rumours in the town were of an immediate 
attack on San Gabriele ; fires seen on Ternovo plateau 
were eagerly watched, in the belief that the Austrians 
were destroying their stores prior to retreat. Hope ran 
high. Indeed, it seemed the very moment to push home 
on Gabriele the moral effect of the victory on Vodice and 
Santo. But several days went by before an effort was 
made against anything except the fringes of the fortress 
mountain. 

(2,041) lO 



146 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Meanwhile we fretted on Vodice top and along the 
gorge road past Canale, but could as yet find no way 
by which cars could reach either Vrh or Ravne. Beyond 
those villages we knew there were passable roads ; but 
how to get there ? Though our ambulances had work 
carrying down to Plava the wounded who arrived by 
hand at Pass 524, or at the foot of the Robot valley, it 
irked us to be thrown out of the hunt three or four 
miles behind the infantry on Bainsizza, and to think 
that every man wounded had at best to be carried by 
hand all that way back over the rough mountains in 
the scorching sun. But indeed our position as regards 
the transport of wounded was only part of the serious 
question of interrupted communications that might at 
any moment be fatal to the Italian vanguard, thrust 
forward beyond Ravne without artillery, water, or sup- 
plies. The genio were hard at work by hundreds re- 
pairing the road to Ravne, but under a heavy fire. 
The Austrian batteries, so far from having left Temovo, 
were being daily strengthened, and had settled down 
to the policy of keeping the road to Ravne impassable, 
which they pursued with partial success for three weeks 
to come. 

By the evening of August 26th the road to Ravne 
had been so far reconstructed that artillery and horse 



THE BAINSIZZA OFFENSIVE. 147 

carts were passing over it, though not without difficulty. 
Hoping that motor traffic would be allowed next day, 
I walked across the moor to Ravne to prepare the way 
there for our cars. Arriving after nightfall, I sought 
the authorities, and found General Gonzaga's head- 
quarters in a little house behind and above the rest of 
the hamlet. I came only for information and orders, 
but I got a dinner, a welcome such as would have befitted 
a brigadier, and, finally, the only other bed beside the 
General's. He was in particularly good spirits, having 
just been knocked over and slightly wounded by a shell. 
At dinner we had excellent talk about Garibaldi and 
other subjects ; the Staff officers were a most interesting 
and agreeable set of men, much elated by the work they 
had in hand. The General warmly invited me to bring 
along the ambulances if they could possibly come, and 
promised us every accommodation that Ravne could 
afford. 

Walking back at dawn on the 27th, I met a number 
of ambulances on Vodice under our car officer, Mr. 
Dyne, trying to get through in a crush with the artillery 
and carts. Some way along the road the route over the 
moor comes into full view of the gunners on the Ternovo 
plateau, and from that point forward the road was under 
so heavy a fire that the traffic authorities were soon com- 



148 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

pelled to stop the progress of the column, halting it out 
of sight of the enemy. Fortunately our two leading cars 
were the last vehicles to be let pass, and so were the first 
ambulances, and I think the first automobiles, to reach 
the Bainsizza. Half-way between Vodice and Ravne, 
at a ruined hamlet called Baske, we found the narrow 
road blocked for us by deserted cannon-limbers at the 
point where the Temovo gunners were specially con- 
centrating their fire. Fortunately we found the drivers 
in a neighbouring dug-out, where they had taken refuge 
after their horses had been killed. On having our pre- 
dicament explained to them they very kindly came back 
and moved the encumbrance out of our way. So we got 
the two ambulances into Ravne that morning, and the 
others joined them when the rest of the column came on 
under cover of night. 

The incident illustrates the immense difficulties of 
the Italian communications on Bainsizza, depending, 
as far as wheeled traffic was concerned, entirely on the 
Ravne ro^d, which ran in full sight of the enemy. It 
was, besides, an execrable road, a mere country track, 
which the Austrians had never converted for military 
uses. We discovered that they had similarly left the 
road from Bate to Vrh in very bad condition. Thus 
the two roads which had for two years past linked up 



THE BAINSIZZA OFFENSIVE. 149 

their magazines with their front line on the Isonzo gorge 
had both been entirely neglected, though their roads 
farther east had been kept in tolerable condition. Was 
it a settled policy of the Austrians to have bad roads 
at the front in order that if the Italians advanced they 
should find communications so difficult that the pursuit 
would slow down } If so, the plan was not unsuccessful. 
It was exactly the opposite policy to that of the Italians, 
who ran first-class roads almost up to the firing-line. 

But indeed the transport systems of the Austrian and 
Italian armies diverged more and more fundamentally 
as the war went on. The Italians learnt to do as much 
as they could by motor traffic, because they had such 
plenty of magnificent Fiats ; and the Austrians as little 
as they could, because the British blockade gradually 
deprived them of rubber. By the end of the war, as we 
found in the advance of November 191 8, all their motors 
jolted along on iron tyres. It is not, then, surprising 
that in 1916-17 they had been in the habit of sending 
little or no motor traffic from the Bainsizza to their front 
line along the Isonzo heights ; hence in part their in- 
difference to the state of the roads at the front, since 
they used them in the main only for horse vehicles. 

We had now the interest of living and working on 
the Bainsizza plateau. As in the case of the equally 



I50 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

famous " Asiago plateau," only a small part of it was 
flat. It chiefly consists of mountains, like Kobilek and 
yet higher groups to the east, enclosing between them 
the valley in which Ravne and Bate lie. But the whole 
district is on a high level, looking down into the vale 
of Gargaro. Although it is not so flat as the Carso, it 
has the same limestone surface and the same queer doline 
or cup-shaped hollows. At the bottom of some of these 
we saw mud-coloured guns and limbers in the dull 
yellow livery of Austria, derelict, or already turned round 
to do service against her. Here and there were patches 
of wood and scrapings of peasant cultivation, and in 
some districts the Austrian army had planted potatoes 
over a wide acreage. On the road back to Vrh the forests 
grew thick, but forward over the eastern heights, toward 
the firing line, and down southwards into the dangerous 
valley of Gargaro, hill and dale were singularly bare. 
The whole land wore a severe beauty. 

But to us the most interesting as well as the most 
beautiful part of the landscape was our novel view of 
the back of captured Monte Santo and the north side of 
besieged San Gabriele, with the Italian shells perpetually 
bursting on its crest. Just on the other side we knew 
that our Gorizia cars were working up the Sella di Dol 
road, not far from the pass top, which we could clearly 



THE BAINSIZZA OFFENSIVE. 151 

see from the Bainsizza. Baker was in charge at Ravne 
and Young in Gorizia, while I, as my Italian friends 
used to say, was sempre in giro between the two, always 
going round by the long circuit of Plava — for though 
Ravne and the Sella di Dol are so near together, they 
were then still so far apart. I was thus able to get a very 
good general idea of the two closely-related battles of 
Bainsizza and San Gabriele, which raged in alternate 
spasms for the best part of a month. 

Until the rough road to Vodice had been re-made by 
the genio — that is, for a week or more — it would have 
been murder to jolt the wounded of Bainsizza back over 
it in our cars. All we could do was to collect them from 
the heavily-shelled dressing-stations at Bate and else- 
where along the forward roads, and carry them to the 
field hospitals at Ravne. Here the famous movable 
surgery of the Citta di Milano, Italian Red Cross,* 
had come to the aid of the regimental and divisional 
surgeons, who, cut off from proper supply, were gallantly 
struggling to make bricks without straw. Ravne, as being 

* I should like to recall here the friendship we had with the Citta 
di Milano everywhere, especially with Professor Baldo Rossi himself ; 
at Quisca, at Ravne, and, later, on the Asiago plateau and on the Piave 
front we had many opportunities to admire their wonderful surgical 
work at the front, and to experience their kindness. General Bassi, 
head of the Itahan Red Cross in the war zone, became our particular 
friend. 



^g^ 



152 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

on the whole the safest of the shelled hamlets on the 
plateau, became for a while a great hospital centre to 
which all the wounded of the Bainsizza battle were now 
carried. At first there was not even a shelter for all 
the hundreds whom we brought in daily, and the sur- 
geons and their staff were worked to the limit of human 
endurance. 

It was, therefore, most necessary to evacuate the 
wounded from Ravne. But until the Vodice road was 
passable for wounded in ambulances, there was no way 
of evacuating except to compel the tired infantry, as they 
came back from the trenches for repose, to spend their 
exhausted energies in carrying their comrades by relays 
over the four miles of mountain tracks to the Isonzo, 
where, at the foot of the Robot brook, our other ambu- 
lances met them, and carried them to the great clearing 
station at Plava. I cannot enough praise the sheer 
goodness of heart with which the povero fante^ coming 
out half-starved and utterly exhausted from long days 
of battle without trenches or water, and looking only for 
a little rest, shouldered the heavy stretchers without a 
frown or a murmur because it was their brothers' burden. 

It will therefore be seen that, during the last days 
of August and the first week of September, the position 



BATTLE OF SAN GABRIELE. 153 

of the Italians on the Bainsizza was highly critical on 
account of their imperfect communications. Meanwhile 
fresh enemy battalions as well as batteries were con- 
stantly arriving from Russia, and the Austrians would 
have had every chance of success if they had been able, 
with all the hosts now collecting on Ternovo, to attack 
the isolated force on the Bainsizza before it had made 
its trenches or established its communications. It was 
at this juncture that the great Italian assault on San 
Gabriele acted as a diversion which saved the Bainsizza ; 
the Austrian divisions had to be thrown one after an- 
other into the narrow pen of slaughter on Gabriele 's 
crest, the smoking altar of sacrifice seen afar off by all 
the spectator armies between Carso and Monte Nero's 
top. 

For us the battle of San Gabriele consisted of our 
service on the Sella di Dol road. The Sella, or " saddle," 
of Dol is the high pass that crosses the range between 
Monte Santo and San Gabriele ; over it winds the well- 
engineered road leading from Gorizia to the Bainsizza 
region. This pass top had fallen to the Italians together 
with Monte Santo, rendering it possible for them to 
proceed to the assault of San Gabriele *s summit, as they 
could now work round by the northern as well as the 
southern side of the crest. Various divisions fought on 



ttgmima^s^^^BsgsgsggggssjSjjgjjgjgggggjj^ggSS^ 



^k ^, c., I \^K I o '"^ r ^.<<*«*''?^To the Chiapovano 

-^uthern Slopps o\ ^^o^^^tp^ ^^^^ 

1 !■ xi^-- ^ Sella / 'H.^;^:^J^S°'"^^J-'^ 




Heights in metres /wv\aa<v> Austrian trenches 



Map IX. — Battle of San Gabriele, Aug.-Sept. 191 7. 



IS4 



BATTLE OF SAN GABRIELE. 155 

Santa Caterina and the lower slopes, but the nth Divi- 
sion, which our Gorizia cars specially served, had the 
task of taking the crest from the saddle. The divisional 
communications ran up this famous road from the ruins 
at Salcano to the ruined inn that marked the top of the 
pass, where the system of Italian trenches now began. 
All supplies had to reach the combatants on the height 
by that road ; the Austrians had the range of it, and 
kept up a fierce barrage, especially on the upper part 
of the road, which was clearly visible from their trenches 
a few hundred yards away.* 

The medical chiefs of the nth Division, our friends 
Major Farragiana and Captain Capocelatro, had estab- 
lished a dressing-station in a dug-out on the top of the 
Sella di Dol. Our cars came up the road to within a 
few yards of the inn on the top, or as far as the shell- 
holes of each day allowed passage. The ambulances were 
the only vehicles that used the road among the infantry 
and mules ascending and descending ; and indeed, but 
for the combination of such romantic spirits as Farra- 
giana, Capocelatro, and Geoffrey Young, I doubt if we 
should have been permitted to go beyond Salcano. But 
we saved many lives and limbs by so doing, and once 

* In the background of the frontispiece, this Sella di Dol road 
is discernible, climbiag up the side of San Gabriele. 



156 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

the service was established it was impossible to break 
it off, for the infantry going up and down the road 
during those three weeks of battle came to regard the 
" Croce Rossa Britannica " as a familiar friend. The 
infantry officers told us that the sight of our buses up 
there was an encouragement to the men. One soldier, 
badly wounded but just able to walk, on being ordered 
by our friend the roadside surgeon to walk down the 
road, delighted him by saying, " No, Aspetto. Vado 
colla Britannica " (" No, I'll wait and go down in the 
Britannica ^^). 

In the early part of the battle, when, in the last 
nights of August, the full moon lit the crags with splen- 
dour, and the shells and searchlights awoke along each 
mountain crest, the view from that high and busy road was 
a dream of romance. Far below our feet the shining river 
swirled round the shoulder of the gorge, and the gigantic 
triangle in which Sabotino abruptly ends was streaked 
with ebony and ivory of white screes and dark brush- 
wood. The spell was laid on the Italian soldier, not the 
least susceptible of the armed races of Europe. " O 
che bel monte ! " " E un bel monte, Sabotino," I 
heard the passing infantry say as they plodded up 
the road, and a wounded man as he waited for his 
turn. 



BATTLE OF SAN GABRIELE. 157 

On such a night as that, the last of August, walking 
through the barrage in front of Metcalfe's car to clear 
the pack mules out of its way, Geoffrey Young was 
wounded by a shell, and subsequently lost his leg by 
amputation down at our own Villa Trento hospital. 
The feeling for our friend shown by all the Italian 
officers, and especially by our medical friends of the 
nth Division, who had the first care of him in Sal- 
cano and Gorizia, touched us all, and we shall always 
be grateful for it. 

The battle came to its climax, though by no means 
to its end, on September 4th, the day they stormed the 
summit. That morning early we found the road blocked 
for us by a shell-hole a little below the Sella, but we 
arranged that the wounded should be carried to a 
large quarry on the roadside that afforded protection, 
whence two of our cars carried them all morning 
in a series of short and very useful runs. In this 
service first Silvester and then Lionel Sessions were 
wounded ; the latter lost his leg by amputation in 
Gorizia that afternoon.* After this the Italian autho- 
rities forbade us to run any more ambulances above 



* For this action Young and Sessions were awarded the silver and 
Silvester the bronze medal, al valor e militare. Early in August 
Young, Sessions, and Metcalfe had been already similarly decorated. 



158 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR 

the point half-way up where the road became directly 
visible to the enemy. 

It had been a day of victory. From the quarry that 
morning I had seen with sudden joy the Italian soldiers 
walking against the sky-line on the summit of San 
Gabriele. But, alas ! it had still to be held, and the 
Italians had not carried all the slopes, or even Santa 
Caterina down below. 

During the next ten days the fire grew hotter on the 
average upon the road, and although we now kept down 
on the lower half that was supposed to be sheltered, 
the infantry and muleteers were even there losing 
severely. In this period of the war both sides were 
using " big stuff " of great potency. One morning I 
saw thirty men lying dead in one dusty heap by the 
roadside. At other times heads and limbs, mingled 
with great rocks, lay scattered over the road. In the 
trenches up above doubtless it was many times worse. 
San Gabriele in the first half of September 19 17 was a 
gruesome slaughter-house, with the massed artillery of 
both armies, now in a high state of efficiency, concen- 
trating on it their fire from all points of the compass. 
The artificial caves that now (November 19 18) are 
visible on the roadside were only constructed after the 
battle. When it was most needed, there was but little 



BATTLE OF SAN GABRIELE. 159 

shelter. The perforatrici (machine drills) that had done 
such good work in rendering Monte Kuk habitable at 
an early date that summer,* seemed to put in a later 
appearance on San Gabriele. There was, however, a 
large natural grotto on the roadside close above Salcano, 
where our friends of the nth Division Sanitk set up a 
wayside dressing-station. Our cars often changed their 
loads there, and there we made many friends, among 
others the medical aspirante Sacchi, grandson of Gari- 
baldi's famous Mantuan surgeon of that name, which 
he honoured again in this war. 

In all that butchery there was no one whom I admired 
more than the regimental stretcher-bearers on the moun- 
tain side, carrying their comrades with painful, patient 
steps down the rough slope until they struck the road 
and reached our cars, never hurrying, still less laying 
down the stretcher, when a shell sent all around them 
ducking and scampering. 

During the ten days following the Italian capture of 
the summit (September 4th) division after division was 
flung in by both sides on to the top of San Gabriele, in 
" a fight for a natural fortress within as narrow limits 
of movement as any old battle for town or castle. It 
was a battle of appalling losses, for both defence 

* See pp. 135-136 above. 



i6o SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

and attack were implacable." * Let it rest at that. 
Finally the summit was divided between the two 
heroic armies. 

The attack on San Gabriele, though it had made 
progress, had not succeeded. But as a diversion it had 
saved the Bainsizza. By the middle of September, when 
the fighting on San Gabriele died down, the Italians were 
well entrenched on Bainsizza, and their communications 
with the Isonzo had been re-established. The road 
from Ravne to Vodice had been re-made and screened, 
and was used by day and night. Our ambulances could 
now carry the wounded back over it, and lorries with 
supplies and ammunition came and went by the hundred. 
The shelling from Ternovo was considerable, especially 
after the San Gabriele battle died down. In two days 
after the middle of the month our men counted from 
the balcony of our house in Ravne as many as 600 shells 
bursting on or beside a stretch of 150 yards of the road 
within 300 yards of Ravne. But these 600 shells only 



* John Buchan, '.' History of the War " (Nelson's), XXI. p. 22. 
John Buchan says the Itahan loss in the month's offensive was 155,000, 
and that the enemy lost correspondingly. I know that the proportion 
of killed and gravely wounded to lightly wounded was higher than 
in battles before and after, owing to the greater part played on this 
occasion by heavy artillery. In the Piave battle in June 1918, machine- 
gun and rifle wounds were more common. 



AFTER THE BATTLE. i6i 

hit two bicycles and one lorry, and did not interrupt 
the traffic ; the screening saved the situation. 

Meanwhile the genio were constructing a magnificent 
new road up the steep lift from Canale to Vrh, and 
had repaired the previously existing road from Vrh 
to Bate ; this northern route through Vrh, invisible 
to the enemy, became from September 19th onwards 
the principal line of communication between the Bain- 
sizza and the Isonzo. 

In the middle of September General Gonzaga and 
his 53rd Division had been replaced by the 44th Division, 
under General Papk — a young man, singularly sim- 
patico. He inherited the old General's quarters in 
Ravne and his kind interest in us. On the day when 
I last quitted Ravne for English leave he was on the 
roadside as I left the hamlet. I remember his hand- 
some, soldierly figure and kind face as he stood by the 
car bidding me good-bye. In England three weeks 
later I heard that he was dead, killed while visiting the 
trenches. Italy lost in him a servant of high promise. 

By the middle of September 19 17 the battles of San 
Gabriele and Bainsizza were over. The Italian success 
had been great, but the Russian collapse had prevented 
it from being pushed home. The limit of human endur- 
ance had been reached, and both sides settled down 

(2,041) 1 1 



i62 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

exhausted on the ground where they found themselves. 
For a month past I had seen so much Italian heroism 
and had lived in such an atmosphere of sacrifice and 
determination that it never occurred to me that we were 
on the eve of a great moral and military disaster. Nor 
should we have been, if it had depended on the troops 
who had just been fighting at Gorizia, Bainsizza, and San 
Gabriele. General Capello justly put his confidence in 
them, but gave, I suppose, too little thought to certain 
untried elements who were being sent up to the quiet 
and neglected zone of Caporetto, now added to his over- 
expanded Second Army. If in 191 6 his command had 
been too limited in area, it was now too big. 

On September 22nd, at General Capello 's head- 
quarters at Cormons, I asked if I could safely take Eng- 
lish leave, and was advised that I could go, as nothing 
would be doing for some time. In the garden outside 
the villa I saw the General in great spirits getting into 
his car. He called me up in his genial manner, thanked 
us for our service with many flattering expressions, and 
inquired, not for the first time, after our wounded. I 
told him I was going on leave, but would be back to see 
him finish his victory. Sed dis aliter visum. 



CHAPTER VII. 

Caporetto and the Retreat, October 1917. 

IVr OW followed, as if from a blue sky, that tremendous 
cataclysm which almost ruined Italy and bade fair 
to ruin the cause of her Allies, but ended in giving to 
her a new national purpose and discipline, and to the 
Allies a closer unity. History, obedient to the popular 
instinct for the concentrated and the picturesque, has 
already decided to call the whole sequence of great events 
by the name of a little Alpine market-town. All the 
meanings now implied by the word " Caporetto " — the 
immense and complicated causes and effects of the 
disaster of which the military sweep over two provinces 
and the rally on the Piave were merely the symbols ; 
the mentality and character of a race ; the merits and 
defects of its political and educational system ; the rela- 
tions of the different classes and parties to the war ; the 
enemy propaganda ; the grievances of the soldiers at 

the front ; the world-strategy of Ludendorff and the 

163 



i64 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

new German tactics ; the actions of Cadorna and his 
subordinates ; Rapallo and the coming of the Allies ; 
and all the shifting fortunes of that wide-flung winter 
battle-field — these things will fill volumes, shelves, and 
libraries in the generations to come. And, regardless of 
all this massive learning and controversy, the people's 
own tradition, told by the peasant at his fireside, will 
burn itself, deep as the shame and pride of Cannae and 
its sequel, into the memory of the oldest civilized race 
in the world. Here I have only a few remarks to offer 
and a few scenes to describe, which have no claim to 
notice beyond the fact that I had lived long with the 
army most involved in the disaster, and that I was 
one of the straws whirled on that vast ebb-tide. 

In order to understand the nature of the phenomenon, 
before inquiring into its causes, it is necessary to realize 
that there were three distinct categories of conduct 
among the Italian troops. To confuse any one of these 
three categories with either of the other two is to mis- 
understand the whole affair. 

First, there were a few regiments who, in accordance 
with a previously-formed intention, abandoned their 
duty, and surrendered on purpose. This was " Capo- 
retto " in the narrower and more strictly accurate sense, 
for it was only in that geographical zone that such be- 



CAPORETTO AND ITS CAUSES. 165 

trayal occurred ; but unfortunately Caporetto was the 
key to the whole strategic position. The phenomenon of 
voluntary surrender had been so common in the Austrian 
army throughout the war, beginning with the early battles 
round Lemberg, that an elaborate system based on 
trustworthy machine gunners had been devised to meet 
it ; but it was so exceptional in the Italian army that 
it took the authorities who might have prevented it 
by surprise, and struck them with something akin to 
panic. 

When, consequently, a general retreat had been 
ordered, the second category of conduct was observable 
in a much larger number of men. The army of Bain- 
sizza, San Gabriele, and Gorizia, who had no thought of 
giving way when the enemy offensive began in the last 
week of October, successfully resisted the attacks made on 
their positions, until the order came from Cadorna to 
retreat beyond the Tagliamento. They carried out irre- 
proachably the difficult retirement across the Isonzo 
gorge and out of the hills ; but as they proceeded over 
the plain, hustled by the victorious enemy pouring down 
on their flank from Cividale, they were gradually in- 
fected by the sense that all was lost. Mainly between 
Udine and the Tagliamento, they gave way at length 
to the war-weariness which had so long been at strife 



1 66 SCENES FROM ITALY^S WAR. 

with their valour and patriotism, flung away their rifles 
wholesale, and passed round the word, *' Andiamo a 
casa" ("We're going home"). The last scenes of the 
Second Army were a sad falling from what the same 
men had shown themselves two months before. 

The third and largest category of all consisted of the 
troops who did their duty throughout. Most of, though 
not quite all, the Third Army from the Carso, and the 
Fifth, First, and Fourth Armies on the Cadore and 
Trentino fronts, saved Italy by holding fast where re- 
quired, and retreating in order where necessary, so that 
the shorter line was successfully established in the early 
days of November. Many heroic feats of individual 
companies, regiments, and divisions illumined the worst 
hours of the Retreat. And some of the finest of these 
were performed by units of the Second Army itself, both 
in the mountain region of Matajur above Caporetto, and 
in the plain of Udine. 

I may be regarded as partial, but I believe that the 
Second Army, though it can scarcely complain if it has 
been made to bear the sins of the nation, was not really 
a worse army than any other, except for the untried and 
undesirable elements whom the authorities had care- 
lessly thrust into Caporetto that autumn. The men at 
Plava and Gorizia had up till then performed the most 



CAPORETTO AND ITS CAUSES. 167 

brilliant and sustained feats of arms done by any part 
of the Italian forces, and if at last they gave way worse 
than the others, that was only in proportion to their 
geographical propinquity to the break-through on their 
flank and rear. Elements in the Third Army suffered 
the same disintegration for the same reason. The half- 
million men of whom the Second Army was composed 
must not be condemned in a mass, nor their previous 
achievements forgotten. None the less the now estab- 
lished tradition that the Duke of Aosta's Third Army 
saved the situation by its superior discipline in the 
retreat from the Carso and by turning to bay behind the 
Piave, represents an essential truth. 

Such in the main were the phenomena ; but their 
causes are a subject far more diffused and obscure, on 
which I can only aspire to throw some feeble lights 
from my personal experience and observation. 

Of the positive treachery at Caporetto itself I can say 
little, because I was not there, and the cars of our Unit 
had been withdrawn from that zone before the regiments 
in fault were sent up. It is common knowledge that 
the ranks of these regiments were filled up with several 
thousands of the munition workers who had taken part 
in the recent Turin revolt. To concentrate these men 
at Caporetto as a punishment was not a very fortunate 



1 68 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

inspiration. I know from what I have been told by 
those who were in Caporetto in the last weeks before 
the disaster, that the soldiers made no secret of their in- 
tentions, and that many of their officers lived in fear of 
their own men, locking themselves up carefully at night. 
Indeed, certain of these troops refused to accept the 
usual gifts distributed by patriotic agencies among the 
men at the front, grounding their refusal on the fact that 
they regarded themselves as no longer in service. This 
refusal, as I know, gravely alarmed certain persons in 
Venice, and was, therefore, probably known in other 
quarters up and down Italy. But since there had been 
so little treachery in the Italian army heretofore, and 
since Caporetto was regarded as a quiet part of the line, 
the responsible authorities left matters alone. Possibly 
the too great isolation in which the Comando Supremo 
was said to live under General Cadorna's regime is 
partly responsible for the failure to scent the smoke 
before the fire. If so, that General, to whom Italy and 
the Allies owe so much, has dearly paid for the defects 
of his qualities. 

With regard to the bulk of the Second Army, I can 
speak at first hand of the men who had hitherto borne 
the burden and heat of the day, but who, after the 
retreat had been ordered, were gradually infected by 



MMiiiiiiiiiai 



CAPORETTO AND ITS CAUSES. 169 

the cry of " Andiamo a casa." I had had for more than 
two years the opportunity to hear their point of view 
and to observe their psychology. 

Let us take the case of an imaginary " Giuseppe," 
and try to reconstruct in his person a type of the povero 
fante. Giuseppe comes from a farm in the Apennines, 
where, in the summer of 19 15, he left a wife and 
five small children. His simple and intensely human 
thoughts and affections are all centred upon them, 
and upon his farm and a village made up of persons 
like himself. Outside that circle he has no experience, 
no knowledge, nor much interest in life beyond a 
good-natured but uninstructed curiosity in whatever 
may be going on under his eyes. Of politics he knows 
nothing. No one has attempted to instruct him in 
them, except the priest, who told him not to vote because 
the State was wicked, and the Socialist, who exhorted 
him to seize the land. He is silently suspicious, both 
of priest and of Socialist, as he is of every one pretend- 
ing to authority. But their combined exhortations can 
have done little to fortify his sense of patriotism or of 
civic duty, which must in his case be instinctive, since 
they have never been inculcated. He has, indeed, heard 
of Garibaldi, and knows that the Austrians are hrutte 
bestie. If he comes from the Veneto, local traditions on 



nm 



lyo SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

the latter point are more definite, and patriotism pro- 
portionally more vivid. Giuseppe can read, which is 
more than can be said of a quarter of his regiment, 
chiefly coming from the south.* But he sets little store 
by the newspapers — ^they do not talk about things that 
interest him ; besides, he regards them as being part 
of the system of authority, and, therefore, their state- 
ments are to be regarded with the respectful scepticism 
that he accords to all things official. 

Between battles there is little drill, training, or dis- 
cipline. The life of the soldier seems to Giuseppe dull 
and purposeless. His officers, who expose themselves 
well in battle, are patriotic, and know all the reasons 
for the war, but they live by themselves. Sometimes 
the Colonel reads the regiment a manifesto about the 
Italian eagle perching on the highest summit of the 
Alps, but some of Giuseppe's companions say under 
their breaths, " Porca Madonna ! Vogliamo andare a 
casa." The officers are not unpopular and never cruel, 
but they do not look after Giuseppe very much. There 
once were two young sotto-tenenti who tried to prevent 
the sergeants taking all the good food ; they succeeded 

* I remember, when I found two soldiers who were drawing water 
at a forbidden source just under a large prohibitory notice, saying to 
them, " Can't you read ? " and being effectively silenced by the quiet 
reply, " No, we can't." 



CAPORETTO AND ITS CAUSES. 171 

for a week, and then things went on as before. The 
food that reaches Giuseppe is much less good and 
plentiful than it was. The trenches are very wet and 
cold when they are not very hot, and they are always 
terribly dull ; several times he has been left in them 
two months on end by some Staff muddle about chang- 
ing battalions. And even when he is in riposo life is 
wet, dirty, and dull. It is seldom one is near a casa 
del soldato. But " Pazienza,^ Giuseppe says ; that is 
his great peasant virtue, on which the ungrateful State 
is built. 

Giuseppe did not make the war : it was not made 
in the village ; the crowds in the town made it that 
night in May when they marched to the Syndic's with 
the flags. But when they called up Giuseppe, he said 
to his wife, " Fazienza^^ and went cheerfully. His 
brother, who had been in the town that night and heard 
the speeches, said Italia needed them ; so they went. 
His brother died of cholera under Sabotino that winter. 

There are several Socialists in the regiment who 
conduct most of the discussions. Some of them are 
patriots, but Aristodemo talks them all down. Giuseppe 
does not understand all that Aristodemo says ; it is 
vague, distant talk coming from the world outside his 
village. But it seems to have some relation to things 



172 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

that are real to him ; the chief of these are his wife's 
letters, saying that prices are so high that she can no 
longer feed the children on the separation allowance. 
She also writes that the priest says the Pope has declared 
there will be peace in a month, but that the chemist says 
they must go on fighting for another three months and 
then they will win. Giuseppe has just come off San 
Gabriele, and knows they will not win in three months. 
Half the regiment was killed there. He doubts if they 
will ever win at all. Russia has given in : he under- 
stands that much about world politics ; also that the 
Inglesi are very stubborn. Aristodemo says the Russians 
are sensible fellows. Porca miseria! he says, what are 
we doing shivering and starving and dying here to win 
these barren mountains where no one lives at all except 
a few barbarians who cannot even talk Italian ? What 
are we fighting for ? The Inglesi pay our masters to go 
on with the war, says Aristodemo, but none of it comes 
our way, except fivepence a day in the front line and 
threepence behind ! Giuseppe has had two leaves of 
ten days each since he joined in 191 5, and each time he 
went back his wife was more depressed and thinner, 
and every one in the village had turned against the war 
except the chemist — but he is always against the priest 
anyhow. 



CAPORETTO AND ITS CAUSES. 173 

Oh yes, says Aristodemo, the Russians have got 
liberty, and so they have all gone home to their farms, 
and taken the land into the bargain ! They have had a 
revolution, and so should we. Well, but Giuseppe has 
twice seen the King in the line, and every one in the 
regiment agrees that he is not imboscato, and that his 
grandfather chased the Austrians out of Italy. But then, 
says Aristodemo, there are plenty of others who are 
imboscati. All the " great guns," he says, keep their 
sons and nephews imboscati ; they sit in the retroviey 
eating beefsteak, and give us poor soldiers in the trenches 
dry chestnuts. Giuseppe laughs at that, and sings a 
song about it, the forbidden song. It has many verses 
that every one knows, and Aristodemo is always writing 
new ones. One verse says : — 

" A Cividale e Udine ci sono imboscati ; 
Hanno le scarpe lucide e capelli profumati." 
(" At Cividale and Udine the embuches live. 
They have shining boots and perfumed hair.") 

The officers first try to stop the song. But it bores 
them to be disobliging, so they soon laugh, and shrug 
their shoulders when they hear it begin. 

Giuseppe has been two and a half years away from 
home, and here is a third winter coming on. When 
he gets away from Aristodemo he wishes he could talk 



174 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

about things to the young sub-lieutenant as he did one 
day last year, when the sub-lieutenant made it all so 
clear to him, and talked about Italia. But now the 
sub-lieutenant has gone. His arm was blown right 
off him on that accursed mountain, and he just said, 
" Viva ritalia ! *' and then his skin grew like wax. 
But Giuseppe carried him away so that the brutte hestie 
never got him. 

On the top of all this came the news of Caporetto, 
and Cadorna's order to retreat. So they trudged off, 
sad at first that it had all come to nothing, and sad to 
leave behind so many dead comrades on those barren 
hills — above all, the two sub-lieutenants, who would mind 
so much if they knew. But as they went on they began 
to feel they were going home. The roads in the plain 
were so crowded that they soon began to pass the artil- 
lery and cars standing blocked in rows. It was raining 
like ruin. No one gave orders or made them keep 
rank. They just splashed on, getting more and more 
like a mob, in the mood of children coming back from 
school. " Andiamo a casa," they said. Evidently Ca- 
doma had given it up, and the war was over. As there 
is going to be peace now, said Aristodemo, let us throw 
away our rifles, and then no fool of an officer can turn 
us back to fight when it is no use. Well, says Giuseppe, 



CAPORETTO AND ITS CAUSES. 175 

the rifles are very heavy, and we have not eaten for two 
days. There is an Inglese ; let us ask him what he 
thinks about the war now ! Giuseppe asks him, not 
unkindly, and the Englishman smiles in a sickly way, 
meant to be at once pleasant and inscrutable. He feels 
that he is being chaffed in the way that he used to be 
chaffed when his side lost the general election at home, 
and he has to try and smile as he used to then. 

To me the thing that needs explaining is not why 
the Retreat occurred, but why it did not occur long before, 
and how the Italian army and nation rallied and reconsti- 
tuted their morale and imposed on themselves a new and 
better discipline. These peasant soldiers were neither 
educated up to understanding the objects and ideals of 
the war like the English and American soldier, nor terror- 
ized like the soldier in the enemy ranks. It was in- 
stinctive patriotism, natural courage, and the peasants' 
stamina and patience that enabled the Italian to put up 
so long with such conditions of life, and to endure war 
losses of 460,000 dead in a population only half the 
white population of the British Empire. The Italians 
are magnificent material, and if only they were given 
good education, they would respond splendidly in peace 
as in war to the requirements of their age and their 
country. 



176 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Until midsummer, 1917, our Unit had a small station 
of cars at Caporetto. We regarded the happy valley as 
a health resort, where drivers who had had a particularly 
severe time at Plava or Gorizia could serve a turn under 
peace conditions. The atmosphere of the place was 
idyllic, protected as it was by great Monte Nero, safe 
in the hands of the Alpini. Behind that rampart the 
Isonzo valley opened out broad and green to Tolmino, 
where, indeed, the Austrians lay, but very quietly. A 
shell was the rarest of events, and Caporetto roofs 
were intact. The statue of a local Austrian poet 
looked out on the square, where life, civil and military, 
went on as in the age of gold. There, beside our 
garage, was the school where some sympathetic Italian 
officers taught the little Slovene children and kept 
them happy little mortals, whom it was a joy to see 
at work or play. 

Such were the ideas that the word " Caporetto " 
conjured up in my mind in those days, and such, it 
seems, mutatis mutandis ^ were the ideas entertained of 
it by the Italian Supreme Command when the blow fell. 
A combination of circumstances marked it out to the 
genius of Ludendorff as the place for the German attack. 
A magnificent road, and a railway alongside it which the 
Italians had just finished, led down a gorge through the 



wm 



THE BREAK-THROUGH AT CAPORETTO. 177 

hills from Caporetto to Cividale, and if once the Austro- 
Germans could debouch on Cividale they had turned 
the flank and rear of all the armies on the Isonzo front. 
It was true that Monte Nero could not be taken by 
assault, but if low-lying Caporetto was captured behind 
it, the Alpini on the great mountain could be isolated 
and masked while the race to the plain went on. Capo- 
retto could be attacked from Plezzo and from Tolmino, 
down and up the course of the Isonzo. The Monte 
Nero positions were really too high up to protect the 
town at their feet. These operations were rendered the 
easier by the dangerously sharp angle here formed by 
the Italian line. This angle was threatened by the 
Austrians' bridgehead at Santa Lucia, which their suc- 
cessful defence of Lom in the last days of August had 
still left in their hands.* And now they were in cor- 
respondence with the disaffected regiments sent up to 
guard these vital but little regarded positions. Every- 
thing pointed to this as the place for the attack by von 
Below's six German divisions, employing Ludendorff's 
new tactics of " infiltration," with which successful 
experiments had already been made on the Russian 
front in September. 

On these lines the stroke was played on October 24, 

* See page 142. 
(2,041) 12 



178 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

1917, with complete success.* The pace and course of 
the Austro-German advance after Cadorna had given 
the general order to retreat can be traced on Map XL 
Not only did the debouchment into the plain at Cividale 
compel the rapid retirement of the Gorizia and Carso 
armies, but as the right wing of the victorious advance 
swept along the northern edge of the plain, closing up 
one valley's mouth after another, they dictated an ever- 
hastier evacuation of the Carnic, Cadore, and Feltre Alps 
by the Fourth Italian Army. Alpini officers have de- 
scribed to me their misery at having to abandon, through 
no fault of their own or of the men under them, not only 
their guns but all the marvellous positions in the highest 
Alps which it had been for two years past their pride 
to guard and perfect for Italy. Many of the retreating 
columns fought magnificent rearguard actions, attack- 
ing and thrusting back the enemy from points which 
imperilled the retreat of other units in the vast and 
difficult area of evacuation. 

After a heavy bombardment at Ravne, in which an- 
other of our cars was destroyed, our men evacuated the 

* On that day a station of the 2nd. B.R.C. Unit, who had suc- 
ceeded us at Caporetto, had one driver wounded and two cars destroyed 
in the courtyard where our cars used to stand so peacefully in old 
days, and where the school used to be. 



10 20 30 40 50 
_! t I 1 I Miles 







Map XL— Stages of En 
(The dates printed on the map refer to 191 7. The dotted line mark 




Advance after Caporetto. 

Furthest Austrian advance across ihe Piave in the battle of June 1918.) 



..■.u.xv^jj».iaiA.t*^ 



.,L.-.L, .^-.-J .LL,.,.^JL, :■■ .UAl^ili^i ' ,.|,|. I |||||||M|.|M 



OUR EXPERIENCES ON THE RETREAT. 179 

last of the wounded off the Bainsizza in the difficult and 
orderly retreat which the army effected out of that dan- 
gerous salient. On the evening of October 27th they 
finally left behind our old scenes of Plava and Quisca, 
after assisting our friend Professor Baldo Rossi of the 
Citta di Milano surgery to get away not only his patients, 
but his invaluable material.* 

All this had been done before I arrived back from 
English leave on the morning of October 27th. That 
night the last of our cars, under Philip Baker's com- 
mand, left Gorizia when the Italians evacuated the 
scenes of so much glory. As we left the house in the 
chestnut grove, where we had been such a happy family 
for more than a year past, with the silent scurry of 
retreat in all the familiar lanes around, I certainly never 
expected to see the place again. Yet in twelve months 
and a few days I was going over the old house once 
more with Geoffrey Young, and laughing to find a 
German war-loan poster on our own notice board. 

That same evening (October 27th) I had received 
orders to evacuate Villa Trento and replant the hospital 



* As a testimony to the help of the Unit on this and other occasions 
the Croce Rossa ItaHana conferred the rather unusual honour of the 
silver medal of its society on F. G. Penman, the driver in charge of our 
ambulances on the Bainsizza after September nth, when Baker went to 
Gorizia. 



i8o SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

at Conegliano. But it was now too late to save the 
material, and only just in time to save the personnel. 
Our good friend Colonel Morino, now medical chief of 
the Second Army, had honoured Dr. Brock and the 
workers of our hospital by choosing it as one of the last 
to function in that zone after the neighbouring hospitals 
had had orders to retire. We took in all the wounded 
who came in these last days, and evacuated them all. 
But we were left on the night of October 27th with 
nothing but our own ambulances, and not all of them, to 
save the material of the hospital, the garage, and all 
that the Unit had in the world, with only a few hours 
to do it in upon the blocked roads before the enemy cut 
in from the north. We had sent off the nurses that 
evening in two ambulances to make sure of their escape. 
But since most of our drivers were arriving at Villa 
Trento exhausted by several consecutive days and nights 
of work on the Bainsizza and in Gorizia, we determined 
to spend a last night in the old home, so that they could 
snatch a few hours' sleep before the final departure for a 
very unknown destination. 

But Baker and I were not easy about the situation, 
and when, at three o'clock in the morning, a neighbour- 
ing small-arms munition dump (or so we supposed) 
began going off with a rattle exactly like that of machine 



OUR EXPERIENCES ON THE RETREAT. i8i 

guns, the noise was so horribly suggestive that, although 
we guessed its real cause, we roused the dozing drivers 
and started the column which had been loaded up over- 
night with as much as the cars were capable of carrying. 
So we left Villa Trento in the dark, though not, as we 
then feared, for ever. 

Outside the Villa gates, in the main road from Cor- 
mons to Udine, we worked our way into the column of 
retreat, that was at first moving a few yards at a time, 
but soon came to an absolute standstill for the rest of 
the night. The column was stretching all the way on 
to Udine, and beyond Udine, through Codroipo to the 
Tagliamento. We found that there was a tacit under- 
standing on the retreat that no one moved at all for half 
the night, because all the horses and most of the drivers 
went to sleep. At dawn they woke up, and the irregular 
serpent jogged on again by fits and starts, here a little, 
and there a little. There was absolutely no road man- 
agement. I did not see a single Carabiniere on the road 
between the Isonzo and the Tagliamento, not even in 
the streets of Udine. The only officer whom I saw 
attempting at one place to direct the traffic was doing just 
the wrong thing — ^namely, forbidding the motor vehicles 
to pass the horse vehicles, which they could not infre- 
quently have done without causing confusion, since no 



i82 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

one was trying to come back against the tide, and every- 
thing, therefore, was going the same way on the broad 
road. But the slowest set the pace, even when there 
was not a complete standstill. Meanwhile thousands of 
farm carts, bearing the fugitive peasantry and their 
household goods, joined the procession of military 
retreat, adding greatly to the congestion. The entire 
absence of traffic control, either general or detailed, 
must, I think, have doubled the number of cannon, 
lorries, and carts that fell into the enemy's hands. 
Every one did that which was right in his own eyes ; 
but, fortunately, being Italians, they were a good-natured 
crowd, and although most of them were starving, and all 
discipline had disappeared, there was neither violence 
nor fear of it. 

Under these conditions the only thing to be done 
was to get off the main road and let the cars work round 
singly or in small convoys by the by-roads and strike 
in again near Codroipo to cross the Tagliamento bridge. 
As it turned out, our cars that took the southern routes 
fared badly, getting into crowds as immovable as those 
on the main road itself, so that finally more than a dozen 
had to be abandoned before the approach of the enemy. 
But those of us who chanced to take the northern circuit 
found clear by-roads on the other side of Udine, and 



OUR EXPERIENCES ON THE RETREAT. 183 

reached the Tagliamento bridge the same evening 
(October 28th), neariy a day ahead not only of the 
cars that had started with us from Villa Trento, 
but of the nurses who had left eight and twelve 
hours before. 

Passing through Udine at midday on the 28th, I 
found all sign of authority had already disappeared from 
the interior of the town. No one pretending to give 
orders was visible on the streets, and any one who wished 
was looting. We had scarcely got outside the western 
gate when the same noise that had decided our departure 
from Villa Trento broke out on the other side of the 
town. Again I felt sure that it was a small-arms muni- 
tion dump being let off, but the Italians in charge of the 
cannon amid which our cars were now jammed held 
other views. And indeed I subsequently learned that 
they were right in their opinion ; an advanced party of 
the enemy had pushed from Cividale on Udine, and were 
scrapping with the Arditi at the other end of the town. 
As we looked back and wondered what the noise meant, 
a German aeroplane, like a vulture on the corpse, swooped 
down low over the roofs, firing as it dived. But the 
Arditi held their ground, and Udine did not fall till 
next day. 

As the vehicles in front of us had now been many of 



i84 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

them deserted, it was impossible for us to move another 
yard down the main road from Udine to Codroipo. Our 
small convoy of six cars perforce turned off the road by 
the only way we could move, across the open fields to 
the north. A single broad ditch would have imprisoned 
us, but we had the luck to get through on to by-roads 
which were comparatively clear for twenty miles, and 
brought us out on to the main road again, beyond the 
hopeless block in Codroipo, close up to the Tagliamento 
bridge itself. 

That evening (October 28th) our little party crossed 
the bridge as dusk fell. On that wet Beresina day the 
mile-long wooden bridge spanned a torrent which spread 
its tossing waves from shore to shore. The unwonted 
fury of the Alpine floods gave us poor fugitives the wel- 
come sense that once across we were in safety, even 
though we looked in vain for any sign of the prepara- 
tions for permanent defence of the Tagliamento, upon 
which we had hitherto counted. For the time being, 
the flood seemed security enough. 

The rain fell steadily, increasing the physical misery 
and mental depression of retreat. But it saved Italy, per- 
haps, from destruction, by impeding the pursuit and pre- 
venting the full use of aeroplanes. The Italians had no 
sufficient means at hand to combat aircraft, and a vigorous 



OUR EXPERIENCES ON THE RETREAT. 185 

attack might have rendered impossible the passage of 
the crowded and narrow bridge, as well as of the Latisana 
bridge farther south over which the Third Army was 
escaping. In the pursuit of the Austrians a year later 
over the same roads, our side found it difficult enough 
to keep up the pace, with the line of communications 
ever lengthening ; but then at least we were blessed 
with a month of perfect weather and hard ground. 
Indeed, when I saw the Codroipo bridge again early in 
November 19 18 the scene and the circumstances were 
very different. The winter sun was gaily shining on 
the distant circle of the Alps and Monte Nero's ledge 
of snow ; the river bed was stone dry, white shingle a 
mile broad ; the bridge that had borne the weight of 
so much misery had disappeared, burnt to the ground, 
and cheerful American " doughboys," who knew not the 
tragic meanings that the place had to us Europeans, were 
marching over dry-shod to help garner the fruits of 
Austria's irreversible " Caporetto." 

But on the evening of October 28, 19 17, the task 
was to save the present, not to spin day-dreams about 
the future. Once we reached the farther shore of the 
Tagliamento we set foot on a more hopeful and active 
world, where officers and Carabinieri were sorting out 
the men as they arrived over the bridge, and orders were 



i86 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

being given and obeyed. That night we reached Por- 
denone, twenty kilometres farther on, where we had 
agreed that our numerous small convoys and isolated cars 
should meet. There I found Dr. Brock, who had already 
secured the villa for our hospital at Conegliano. But it 
was now highly doubtful whether we should ever have 
a hospital there or elsewhere. I spent a wet and anxious 
night in the public square at Pordenone watching for 
arrivals, but no one came. At morning I was faced by 
the ugly fact that the nurses, who had started in two 
parties nine and six hours before us from Villa Trento, 
had not yet arrived. And among the persons still un- 
accounted for was Geoffrey Young on crutches, who, 
together with the devoted Matron, Miss Power, had left 
Villa Trento with the last of us. There could be no 
question of driving back to the bridge against the throng, 
so I set off to walk. 

Before I reached the bridge I had the relief of my 
life. I met first the Matron and Young, and then half 
the nurses and sure news of the other half. They had 
all been obliged to abandon their cars in the block and 
walk. How Young had come so many miles without a 
car in his then condition only he and those who helped 
him through can tell. Next year he got an artificial leg 
fitted by the famous orthopaedist. Professor Putti of 



OUR EXPERIENCES ON THE RETREAT. 187 

Bologna, and rejoined us on the Piave in time for the 
battle in June. 

One party of the nurses had been accompanied and 
aided in the worst part of their retreat by Colonel Hayley 
of the British batteries, who, reduced like them to pedes- 
trianism, had fallen in with them by the way, and shown 
them the same friendliness that all the officers of the 
British batteries had always shown to the Croce Rossa 
Britannica. The Red Cross was able to repay their 
kindness, for it was owing to the indefatigable work of 
some cars of Mr. Alexander's Third B.R.C. Unit, at- 
tached to the batteries on their retreat from the Carso 
by the Latisana bridge, that no British sick or wounded 
fell into the hands of the enemy. These services General 
Hamilton recognized in a generous letter. 

All the British guns were got away, though they 
started late off the Carso. Heaven knows how it was 
done. The English are wonderful in misfortune. Not 
a man or woman in the retreat, whether British army or 
B.R.C, but rose to the height of the occasion. Ours was 
not a grumbling Unit, as English people go, but it was the 
only week in the war when no one grumbled about any- 
thing. Yet, Heaven knows what they had to put up with. 

We gathered our remnants together as they came in 
to Pordenone — half our cars, but fortunatelv all our men 



1 88 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

— ^and thence drove straight on to Padua. To stop at 
Conegliano was out of the question, even if we had had 
material for a hospital, for the line of the Piave was the 
utmost that any one now proposed to hold. And, in- 
deed, the days of our hospital work were numbered, for 
we had lost even the little that we had taken from Villa 
Trento in the cars that had been abandoned. Only 
some of our garage plant was left us. So the ladies, 
who for two years had done such magnificent work for 
Italy, went back to England from Padua. 

One scene at Padua stays in my mind's eye. In the 
Piazza Garibaldi stands the statue of the liberator, look- 
ing down with his face of simple faith and valour. In 
front of his pedestal, hour after hour, day after day, 
passed the files of the dejected and unarmed, his country- 
men. It was impossible not to think him alive and 
watching. One almost heard his voice upbraiding them. 
In all the wonderful changes and chances of the year that 
followed, that graven image, hand on sword hilt, seemed 
to watch and know. After the end of the June battle 
that saved Italy and the cause of freedom, I saw the 
crowd in front of him cheering the King as he drove 
by, a victor. And once more, on the night of the 
armistice that ended Austria, the Paduans set between 
Garibaldi's arms the staff of the flag he loved. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

The Rally, November-December 1917 — High Alpine warfare, 1918 — 
The June battle on the Piave. 

TN the first days of November 19 17 the Second 
Army disappeared altogether from the line. But the 
front was becoming daily so much shorter by the con- 
tinuous withdrawal towards Italy's " bottle-neck " of the 
Piave and Asiago (see Map XL, pages 178-9) that the 
Fourth Army from the north and Third Army from 
the south were able to link hands across the gap. Day 
by day the Duke of Aosta's Third Army fought rear- 
guard actions in the plain, now on the Tagliamento, now 
on the Livenza, and finally stood firm behind the Piave, 
where the enemy's inability to bring up heavy cannon 
quickly over the long bridgeless roads compensated for 
the fact that the Italians had lost so many of theirs 
which it would at best take weeks and months to 
replace. 

It was already clear that the army would make g 

189 



I90 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

fight for it, if the country behind would pluck up cour- 
age. All turned on that " tremendous //." Now, in 
the souls of four-and-thirty millions from the Alps to 
Sicily, a decisive battle was waged in the secular con- 
flict between the persistent materialism and the no less 
persistent idealism of the Italian nature. The very ex- 
istence of the idealist principle in the common life of the 
race was threatened, and to some seemed already doomed. 
Italy, having striven for a hundred years to be a great 
and free country with traditions and memories of her 
own making, had not, it seemed, the necessary staying 
power. Was she, after all, fit only to be a '* museum, 
an inn, a summer resort " for German " honeymoon 
couples," " a delightful market for buying and selling, 
fraud and barter," as in the days before Mazzini ? Had 
the fathers of the Risorgimento been mere sentimen- 
talists, who tried to make the land of their dreams out 
of earthen clay ? Had the true decision been, not in 
i860, but in 1849, if only they had had the sense to 
accept it ? Or had they perchance been right after all, 
those great ones of old, with that large faith of theirs ? 
The world would soon know. 

By a fortunate indiscretion Cadoma, in his first rage 
at the news from Caporetto, had issued a communique 
telling the truth about the betrayal, and cursing the 



THE RALLY. 191 

regiments who had opened Italy's house-door to the 
foe. The first draft was hastily suppressed and re- 
issued in a modified form ; but not before enough people 
had seen the original to send it flying by old Rumour's 
post over the length and breadth of Italy. It brought 
to their senses many blind and weak-kneed patriots. 
Suddenly, as by a flash of lightning, men and women 
in Turin and Florence, and in the remotest villages of 
north and south, saw what they had done by their mur- 
murings, their cryings for peace when there was no 
peace, their sympathy with deserters, their discouraging 
letters to the front. Even in Clerical circles in Rome 
fashionable ladies admitted that " the thing had gone 
too far." The over-practical pacifists of Caporetto, 
instead of being in favour with the nation whom they 
had striven to release from the obligations of further 
self-defence, were everywhere cursed as traitors. Heaven 
knows there is no need to curse them any more now. 
They had wrought better than they intended. And in 
the last twelve months 100,000 Italian prisoners have 
perished of want in Austria-Hungary ! If any of 
those who went over at Caporetto dreamed of find- 
ing " comrades " among the Austrians, they had been 
tragically deceived. 

The better elements in Italy seized the lead, and 



192 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

kept it until the war was won. Orlando, though he had 
been accused of too lax a tolerance of the enemy propa- 
ganda during his Ministership of the Interior, now 
succeeded to the Premiership, and initiated proper 
measures on the " home front." Hitherto, though the 
press had been generally sound, the other methods of 
propaganda had been worked more effectively by the 
enemy's party than by the patriots. From henceforth 
all that was changed. There was a simultaneous im- 
provement in governmental methods and in the general 
trend of public opinion, nor is it easy to say which was 
the cart and which the horse. 

One of the most remarkable forms in which the new 
spirit of the nation clothed itself was the Propaganda of 
the Mutilated. On October 28th, when Cadorna's orig- 
inal communique was first bruited in the streets of Milan, 
nine maimed officers met in that city, which is ever the 
hearth of Italy's flame, and, sitting round the bed of 
Lieutenant Count Paulucci, who had been paralyzed 
by a wound on the Carso, decided how best, out of 
their physical infirmities, they might derive strength for 
their country's need. They formed themselves into a 
Committee of Propaganda, and wired that day to the 
Comando Supremo for leave to begin their campaign. 
Leave was granted, and the work sped. Their numbers 



THE RALLY. 193 

were increased, and among the privates and officers who 
had lost eyes and limbs were found men with the strange 
power of the Italian revivalist preachers of old time, of 
Savonarola and of Ugo Bassi. In one industrial village 
in the Milanese, the Mayor and population refused the 
missionaries a hearing ; but the paralyzed Lieutenant 
Paulucci, held up on a table by his soldier friend, began 
to speak, and in an hour had converted them all, and 
drove off amid a frantic ovation. But the most effective 
speaker was said to be a blind private. Their propa- 
ganda was also carried on in the army itself.* 

As the remnants of the Second Army slunk away 
into Lombardy along the by-lanes of western Venetia, 
one saw by their bearing that they knew they had made 
a great mistake. More and more one experienced, 
along the whole line of towns and villages from Mantua 
•to Treviso, that the heart of the population was sound. 
The fear of the coming of the " Tedeschi " bound 
every one together in a common bond of brotherhood, 
to which the Italians know how to give such sympathetic 
expression in the contact of everyday life. To be in 
English uniform was to be sure of the kindest reception 
everywhere in those dark days. And the mere sight of 

* For further details, see the Anglo-Italian Review, October 1918, 
pp. 169-173. 

(2,041) 13 



194 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

the market-towns of the Veneto, with their fourteenth- 
century brick walls of defence, and their dark, mys- 
terious colonnades along the ancient streets, brought 
comfort to the heart. It was impossible to believe that 
such beauty would be given over to the Vandals. So, 
too, with the rich fields of the plain and the large thresh- 
ing-floors of the farms where we parked our cars. Surely 
men would fight to defend this land of theirs, so popu- 
lous and so beautiful, whatever doubts the more ignorant 
may have had as to the purpose of the war on the barren 
and barbarous heights beyond the Isonzo. The insight 
that we obtained into the prosperous life of the villages 
of the great plain during our sojourn near Mantua made 
us understand better the value of the life men lived in 
Italy and of all that was at stake. 

We had lost half our ambulances, and those that 
were left were in no condition for fresh service till they 
had been overhauled. We had never been in riposo 
since our arrival in September 1915, for we had never 
gone back with any of the successive Italian divisions, 
but remained always in the front-line service.* But 
now that the Second Army, which we had served, 



* This had only been rendered possible by the constant work of 
our mechanics under the Mechanical Officer, Mr. G. C. Marriage. We 
did all our own repairs in the garage at Villa Trento. 



THE RALLY. 195 

was going altogether out of the line, we took the 
opportunity to have three weeks' repose near Mantua 
to reconstitute the Unit and repair the cars, before 
going up to the Piave again to take service under the 
Third Army. 

And so it came about that I saw a British army, 
the first that ever entered the Lombard plain, march 
out of Isabella d'Este's fortress across Vergil's lake. The 
dull anxiety that overhung the brightest moments of 
that November month seemed lifted as they marched 
by. Looking on such men, it seemed impossible to think 
we could be beaten. What perfection of equipment, of 
drill, of discipline, and yet what lively suppleness of in- 
dividual will in every man. The kitchen fires burning 
as they marched, the glossy-coated horses and shining 
harness, even the hard-won brilliance of the objurgated 
buttons were not wasted in that march through Italy. 
I believe the Italians, civil and military, were cheered 
at the sight as I was cheered ; and confidence was what 
we needed then. The fall of Jerusalem came in use- 
fully enough. Certainly the reception of the British 
troops all along the route was splendid. Many of them 
marched with gifts of flowers and Italian flags stuck in 
their rifles, determined to please and to be pleased. 
But since they had to detrain at Mantua and march all 



196 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

the way to the Piave, it was only on December 4th that 
they got into Hne on the Montello. The French, being 
nearer at the first call, had appeared in the northern area 
some time before. 

Italy was not deserted by her Allies. Caporetto was 
a blow for Little- Westerners in France and England. 
Of these Lloyd George had never been one, nor was he 
the man to let the grass grow under his feet in time of 
crisis. As early as November 5th Caporetto gave birth 
to the conference of Rapallo, where the leaders of Eng- 
land, France, and Italy laid down the lines of unity of 
front which developed into the united granary, the 
united exchequer, and the united command which, with 
America as partner, won the war in a year. 

One of England's best loans to Italy was General 
Plumer. All the influence of his strong character was 
steadily cast for holding the Piave line at all risks, because 
the risks involved in further retreat were greater still. 
Yet the proposition that the Piave could be held as 
the final line was a paradox to most Italians and 
Englishmen early in November, and by no means a 
certainty in December. Only gradually, day by day, 
the feelings of permanence and security grew up along 
the front, as day by day the Italians resisted the repeated 
and furious assaults of the Austrians at point after point 



THE RALLY. 197 

of the mountain positions, from Asiago round by Grappa 
to the plain. Without the protection of trenches, the 
lads of seventeen and eighteen, brought up untrained 
from the depots, saved their country again and again. 
Only three miles more, and the enemy would have stood 
on the top of the great wall of mountain that falls sheer 
into the plain, the Piave barrier would have been turned, 
and Venice lost. 

We returned to service on the Piave on November 
2 1 St. The fighting there was over, and there was little 
doing except diligent drilling, the building up of the 
new spirit, and the construction of line behind line of 
defences between Treviso and the river. But what 
would all this be worth if the hills were to be turned 
behind us ? And when was the snow coming ? Morn- 
ing after morning we raised our eyes to the hills in 
hopes of seeing the seasonable cloak of white, long 
overdue — but in vain. It was lovely weather, fresh and 
sunny, restorative to the moral and cheerfulness of the 
army, but snow it would not. It was not the snow that 
saved Italy, but the valour of her sons. 

By the end of January 19 18 the Austrian attempt to 
break into Italy had been definitely defeated and the 
line was established where it remained, with very slight 



198 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

modifications, down to the end of October. Until that 
final settling of accounts with Austria, General Diaz 
undertook no large offensive ; and as the Austrians only 
once attacked him, in the famous week of the June battle, 
the year 1918 was very peaceful in Italy as compared 
to France, and as compared to any one of the other 
three years of the Italian war. That the cautious policy 
of Diaz and Badoglio, now his Chief of Staff, was 
right in the main cannot be seriously questioned, though 
there may be differences as to detail and degree. Caution 
achieved not only survival, which for long was highly 
uncertain, but the most complete of victories. It would 
have been folly for the Italians to attack before the 
autumn, and it was no part of the Allied plan. The 
Austrians, no longer having the Russians to contend 
with, were superior in the number of divisions, and 
above all in the strength of positions, for everywhere 
to the east of Pasubio they were far over the water- 
shed, on heights dominating the Italian lines. The 
Austrian army could not, therefore, have been defeated 
until its moral had been disintegrated by political and 
economic action. And an unsuccessful attack might 
have reacted most unfavourably on the Italian moral, 
which was being so carefully nursed after its almost 
fatal illness. 




(During the retreat in November 1917 the Austrians had advanced w^ 

shown on M 




ian and Allied Defence, 1918. 

luation to sea. 

;he Arsiero and Asiago regions beyond the line of end of June 1916, 
\ above.) 



THE AMERICAN RED CROSS. 199 

Nevertheless it was an unavoidable minor misfor- 
tune, or so I always felt it to be, that the year when 
there were a large number of English and French on 
the Italian front was the year when things there were 
so quiet. The Allies inevitably came to think of the 
Italian front as a " peace front," because they never 
saw what a few of us had seen — the repeated and stub- 
born Italian offensives of 1915, 1916, and 19 17. Eng- 
lish attention was directed to Italy principally during 
the year when it was her wise policy to wait and recu- 
perate. Hence it surprised some people, though it did 
not surprise me, to learn that the Italians killed in the 
war were as numerous as the British, in proportion to 
the size of Italy's population.* 

While three British and three French divisions took 
their share in strengthening the Italian line on the Piave 
and Asiago, the Americans, who had no troops at hand, 
devoted themselves with characteristic energy, publicity, 
and largeness of scope, to fortifying the *' home front." 
The American Red Cross did fine ambulance work at 
the front ; but it did not confine itself to the sick and 
wounded there, or even to the refugees, but also pur- 
sued an intensive cultivation of the towns and villages 
of the north, centre, and south, combating want and 

* See p. 235 below. The wounded were fewer in proportion. 



200 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

discontent, the enemy garrison which always threatened 
the rear of the ItaHan army. Above all, the soldiers' 
families, with their insufficient separation allowances, 
received in every village of the Peninsula the aid of the 
American Red Cross, a fact which reacted most favour- 
ably on the tone of the army at the front. 

Thus the able and distinguished men whom America 
sent to Italy as chiefs of her Red Cross, backed by un- 
limited funds, helped Orlando greatly in the work of 
removing the discontent of the country and spreading 
a sense that time and victory were on the side of the 
Allies, because America was coming along. I have said 
that in 1917 the Italians appreciated but little the power 
and purpose of America in the war.* But in 19 18 it 
gradually became their prevailing idea, until America 
much more than filled up to them the blank left by 
Russia, and gave a warm assurance of ultimate victory. 
It was good to see the Italians taking to these brave 
newcomers, who spoke our tongue, and were always 
the best of friends to us. 

Though in November our Unit could resume work 
only on a small scale, by the spring we had replaced 
most of the ambulances which we had lost in battle or 

* See p. 139 above. 



THE MOUNTAIN 'FRONT, 1918. 201 

retreat.* From February onwards we maintained our 
stations in the plain with the Third Army on the Middle 
Piave, and other stations in the hills with the First Army 
far to north and west. Our base and garage were at the 
Villa Trieste, in the Euganean Hills near Arqua, the 
well-chosen seat of Petrarch's old age. 

In February our hill stations were at Puffele and the 
neighbourhood, serving the Asiago front. On the days 
of our arrival on the plateau the deep snow came at last, 
with a driving Arctic wind. It was very cold living in 
tents and holes in the limestone until we got our wooden 
huts set up. At that pinch we had reason to admire 
the way in which our Italian soldier-servants, though 
not professional cooks, would always produce a hot and 
succulent meal of pasta under apparently impossible 
conditions. It is one of the arts of the race, very useful 
in campaigning. I saw something of the front line over 
against Asiago town, in the romantic fir forests of the 
plateau, and was glad to find that the men in the trenches 
had warm huts, plenty of blankets, and better food than 



* Our new cars were furnished principally by the Committee in 
Aid of Italian Wounded and its friends, in particular by the generous 
aid of the Silver Thimble Fund. In the last year, as in the earlier 
years of the war. Sir Walter Becker of Turin gave us Hberal support. 
Our reconstitution and recovery after the Retreat were largely due to 
the efforts of the Car-Of&cer, Mr. Dyne, and the Adjutant, Mr. John 
Braithwaite. 



202 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

the year before. Caporetto, in one of its aspects, had 
been a successful strike for better conditions of Hfe for 
the povero fante. But there were still marked differ- 
ences of treatment and moral observable between one 
division and its neighbour. It is very unsafe to gener- 
alize about the Italian army. 

We had hardly settled into our new work and quar- 
ters, when we were turned out again by the arrival on 
the Asiago plateau of the French and English forces, 
who in March took on this, perhaps the most critical 
point in the Italian line. As we served only the Italians, 
we shifted ground, moving our hill stations into the 
service of the loth Army Corps at Arsiero, and of the 
5th Army Corps in Vallarsa, on the two sides of the 
Pasubio massif. We now saw for the first time the real 
high- Alpine war, differing almost as much from the life 
on the Asiago plateau as from that on the plain of the 
Piave itself. Our work lay, of course, at the foot of the 
teleferiche, or aerial railways, which fed the war on those 
astonishing rock citadels : the sick and wounded came 
down the wires in cages, hundreds of feet in air. Ar- 
siero,* situated near the junction of the Posina and 
upper Astico torrents, lies at the very foot of Monte 
Cimone, an acropolis of immense proportions then occu- 

* See Maps IV. and XII. 



lkz-^_ 



THE MOUNTAIN FRONT, 1918. 203 

pied by the Austrians. They could almost have thrown 
stones, and they could fire machine guns, into the streets 
of Arsiero from their perch 3,000 feet overhead. The 
Italian line defending the town hung on to an isolated 
pinnacle of rock, as grotesque a position as anything 
depicted in Captain Bairnsfather's Italian tour. Arsiero 
itself was deserted ; but two houses were still inhabited 
by our friends of the Sanita when our men first came to 
live with them in March 191 8. They were soon after- 
wards shelled out of them, and the whole party moved 
into huts close under the edge of the cliff, in which a 
cavern capable of holding several hundred wounded 
was excavated and fitted up. 

One day I visited the Pria Fora * mountain on the 
other side of the valley. The Austrians had stormed it 
in May 19 16 when it was wholly unfortified ; but they 
were not likely to do so again, for its massive rock sum- 
mit had now been excavated into a labyrinthine fortress, 
with four storeys of galleries one above the other, each 
grinning with cannon and machine guns. There were 
also mediseval-looking wooden machines for pouring 
volleys of rocks down the gullies by which the enemy 



* Pria Fora — " Pietra forata," the perforated rock, so called on 
account of a natural archway in the rock crest, far seen against the 
skyline from both sides of the mountain. 



204 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

might attempt to ascend. The artillery pointed out 
to us similar rock fortresses of the Austrians several 
miles away to the north. The most experienced of the 
Alpini officers, who had taken part in the heroic defence 
of trenchless Monte Grappa in the last November, told 
us that they did not see how either side could possibly 
advance through the higher Alps now that they had 
been fortified, if the defenders offered any serious re- 
sistance. 

The Ninth Division, whom we served here in the 
Astico valley, had a " trench paper " called the Astico, 
written and illustrated entirely by officers and men. ' It 
contained capital stuff and a great variety of artistic 
talent, much better than many more pretentious papers. 
It was an attractive little item in the great patriotic 
propaganda of the year 191 8. 

At our other mountain out-station, Vallarsa,* we 
ourselves lived on high ground, though still at the foot of 
the tekferiche. Here we lay in Austrian territory, be- 
yond the Piano delle Fugazze, or Dolomiti Pass, on the 
north side of the watershed, looking down the vale to 
Rover eto and Trent. The Pasubio massif, over 7,000 
feet high, towered above us, bounding the valley to the 
east. Pasubio, though in Austrian territory, had been 

* See Maps I. and IV. 



THE MOUNTAIN FRONT, 19 18. 205 

held by the Alpini all through the war, saving Italy in 
May 19 1 6 and November 19 17. On its southern and 
western faces it presented the most superb range of 
Dolomite chimneys and pinnacles to the view. From 
our hut door in the Val di Prigione — a colossal " Dun- 
geon Ghyll " — ^we looked up at dawn to the world of 
George Meredith's " Hymn to Colour," where " rocks 
raised clear horns on a transforming sky." Although 
on each of these horns companies or batteries were 
hidden away, and, in some, men were burrowing and 
counter-mining against each other, and swinging them- 
selves about on ropes to give or take sudden death, the 
war was here a thing so much smaller than nature that 
in Vallarsa the whole grim business only set off the 
mountain glory in which it was framed. 

It seemed fitting, therefore, that one of the ap- 
proaches to the Corno pillar rock, the chief bone of con- 
tention in Vallarsa when we were there, should be called 
by the Italians after Battisti himself. For there that 
gallant gentleman had been captured by the Austrians 
as he headed an attempt on Corno. Socialist, idealist, 
patriot, and man of intellect and refinement, Cesare 
Battisti has nobly closed the long roll of Italy's political 
martyrs. His soul seemed to haunt the rocks of Pasubio, 
pointing down towards Trento, where they had hanged 



2o6 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

him for a traitor. Now they are justly paid ; they and 
their worm-eaten bogey-show of mediaeval gibbets have 
been kicked bag and baggage over the Brenner, and 
trampled out of sight by their own subjects in every 
corner of the ramshackle empire which they have filled 
with blood and wailing and oppression for too many 
generations past.* Austria-Hungary is now an " his- 
torical expression." 

It was in Vallarsa that we came across General Boriani, 
then commanding the 29th Division, one of the remark- 
able personalities of the Italian army, with his six wound 
stripes and his brooding, fiery impetuosity on all sub- 
jects, tempered by an extraordinary good humour and 
hospitality of which our men were the beneficiaries. 
Under his auspices the Alpine Arditi, by a wonderful 
feat of military and gynmastic valour, effected the cap- 
ture of the Corno pillar rock, attempted in vain by Bat- 
tisti and so many others. Here, too, we had the pleasure 
of working with Colonel Cirieci, a model medical officer 
for a difficult mountain district, always going the diffi- 
cult rounds on Pasubio, in constant thought and action 



* The fondness of the of&cial Austro-Hungarian mind for gallows 
work is amazing. In the pursuit in November 1918 we found in 
their quarters, more than once, collections of photographs and nega- 
tives of various pitiful executions of Czechs, Bosnians, Serbs, etc. I 
hope that those who treasured them, like the present turn of events ! 



MORAL OF THE TWO ARMIES. 207 

for the health of the troops. The men and scenery were 
both fine that summer in Vallarsa.* 

We now enjoyed so many close connections of service 
and friendship in so many different divisions spread 
over so wide an area of mountain and plain, that, con- 
stantly talking to people of all ranks, we acquired a 
conception of the trend of feeling in large portions of 
the Italian army. In general there was a strong upward 
curve in moral throughout the year 1918 ; but it was 
not a regular curve, especially not in the first half of 
the year. In some places and at some times the men's 
spirits were confessedly molto in basso. Sometimes 
some of them would say resignedly, " Oh, the Austrians 
will be here next week." The worst moment was the 
end of March and beginning of April, when the news of 
the British disaster in France made the knees of the 
weak as water. If the Austrians had made at the be- 
ginning of April the general offensive which they put off 
till the end of June, the result might possibly have been 
different. But when it became evident that the Germans 
had not got through to Amiens or the Channel ports, 
people got accustomed to hearing of German offensives 
that went a certain distance but never fino al fondo, 

* It amused us to think that our mess in Vallarsa was probably 
rche only British mess on enemy territory in Europe. 



2o8 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Between the middle of April and the middle of June 
the Italian army began to be affected by a new idea — 
namely, that the enemy's moral was worse than their 
own, and that Austria-Hungary was politically in pro- 
cess of dissolution. The Pact of Rome, concluded early 
in April between the Italian and Jugo-Slav leaders, was 
the prelude to a systematic propaganda among the 
enemy forces, ably organized by Italian Intelligence 
officers, and zealously carried out by ex-prisoners be- 
longing to the oppressed races of Austria-Hungary. In 
No Man's Land, musical Czechs serenaded their com- 
patriots with Bohemian songs, and set gramophones 
going instead of machine guns. The Czecho- Slovaks, 
in Italian uniform, with the Bohemian national colours 
of white and red in their Alpino hats, became a common 
and favourite sight upon the roads. This new way of 
envisaging the war went well with the ever-increasing 
importance of America in the mind's eye of the Italian 
soldier. The new National Internationalism of Mr. 
Wilson and his Fourteen Points vaguely adumbrated a 
broader outlook and a brighter age ahead, beginning 
with a better chance of winning the war. There seemed 
a new tide in the world's affairs, and Giuseppe vaguely 
felt that he was a part of it, while the enemy was fight- 
ing against the future. By the time that the Austrians 



THE JUNE BATTLE, 1918. 209 

tardily launched their great offensive, the Italian soldiers 
had an idea that their own moral was at least as good 
as the enemy's. And in military moral there is nothing 
good or bad but thinking makes it so. 

When the Austrian blow fell at last there was no half 
measure about it. Although the internal condition of the 
Empire, political and economic, was even worse than we 
knew, the authorities believed that they could win such 
a victory as would relieve their almost desperate situa- 
tion. But for this purpose the victory must this time 
be decisive. Their generals planned and their army 
confidently expected to go straight through at the first 
rush to Treviso, where they had allotted houses for 
the different regiments and officers. After that they 
believed that Italy's resistance would collapse. 

The offensive was launched with equal fury along an 
unbroken line of attack stretching from the Asiago front 
opposite the British, right round by Grappa, the Mon- 
tello, and the course of the Piave down to the sea.* At 
dawn on June 15th it began along this great stretch of 
ground with a bombardment of terrible efficiency. Some 
of the British officers told me they had never seen better 
shooting or a hotter barrage in France. The result was 

* See Maps XI. and XII. for this battle. 
(S.041) 14 



210 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

that early that morning the Austrians carried with little 
resistance almost the whole front line of the Allies from 
Asiago to the marshes at the Piave mouth. 

But their success on the mountains was short lived. 
The British, furious at losing any ground to the Austrians, 
drove them out again with fearful slaughter, and pursued 
them into their own lines, where all resistance ceased. 
The reaction of the French and Italians on the mountain 
front was also very rapid. Between Piave and Brenta, 
on the Grappa massif, the Austrians had begun by 
storming positions which commanded Bassano and 
threatened the whole line. But Diaz now knew that 
the proper reply to the new Ludendorff tactics of " in- 
filtration " was instant counter-attacks, and these were 
carried out with magnificent vigour and success. 

By the end of the second day all was well over in 
the mountain area. But on the low, long " mound " of 
the Montello and in the plain of the Piave the battle 
continued for another week of desperate and uncertain 
fighting. On the morning of the 15th the Austrians 
had crossed the Piave. In the north they had taken 
and held nearly half the Montello, and again farther 
down the course of the river, on both sides of Ponte 
di Piave and Santa Dona, they had securely lodged 
themselves on the further shore, and had pushed on 



THE JUNE BATTLE, 1918. 211 

from two to four miles, threatening to break through 
to Treviso. 

It was in this part of the battle that we worked, 
doing front-line service for the wounded of the nth 
Army Corps, to north and south of the trunk road 
leading from Treviso to Ponte di Piave. By sending up 
our reserves and drawing away cars from the Pasubio 
district, where battle was refused,* we increased the 
number of our ambulances from eight to twenty before 
the end of the action, and carried in the week 4,500 
wounded, of whom about 2,000 were stretcher cases. 
The army corps had a two-division front, and employed 
five divisions in all, three to south, where the fight was 
hottest, and two to north. This meant that in the area 
of severest fighting there was a change of men twice 
in the eight days. The Austrians also changed their 
regiments, but how often I cannot say. 

To my unprofessional eye it seemed that the battle 
was admirably fought where I saw it, and that the 
Italian officers, from the generals downwards, had it 
thoroughly in hand. It was an anxious affair, because 
the enemy's tactics of *' infiltration " had the immense 

* What we did on the small scale Diaz at the same time did on 
the great. He took the fullest advantage of the " inner line " and 
brought forces of all arms across from the mountains of the west and 
north to the Piave plain, the Fiat lorries as usual plajdng a great part. 



212 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

advantage that no one could see clearly more than twenty 
yards in front of him in that gardenlike plain, where 
rows of vines and fruit trees in full leaf, all running 
from north to south, parallel with the fighting line, 
formed a series of low screens, ten or twenty yards 
apart. Except down the roads and the railway there 
were no avenues of vision. Neither were the Italians 
fighting in prepared lines of defence, as they had lost 
their first line on the river bank when the battle began, 
and were never driven back as far as their second. 
Both sides had equally little advantage of ground, and 
fought behind dyke banks, in ditches and drains, or in 
improvised trenches scratched in the soft soil. 

Naturally under these conditions the battle was always 
swaying to and fro in rushes and rallies. The cry was 
perpetually being raised of an enemy '* infiltration " in 
such and such a part of the blind garden battle ; and 
on these occasions the danger was of panic. After the 
Caporetto experience the divisional, brigade, and regi- 
mental ofiicers were all keenly on the lookout to stop 
the slightest sign of it, and I saw more than one incipi- 
ent panic, due to an enemy " infiltration," very promptly 
and ably dealt with. Above all, the reserves were well 
handled, here locally as well as by Diaz on the grand 
scale. The Bersaglieri ciclisti were hurried up on their 



THE JUNE BATTLE, 1918. 213 

" push bikes " along the lanes to the threatened spot 
time after time, and never in vain. 

We worked up to the regimental dressing-stations 
as close to the line as the roads permitted ; and since the 
line was often shifting forwards or backwards, the work 
was not without excitement. The Ford ambulances, of 
which we had latterly acquired a fair number, were 
admirably suited to pushing up the narrow country lanes 
closed to all other cars by shell-holes, and it often sur- 
prised and pleased the infantry and Bersaglieri to find 
that we could thus keep pace with them. Meanwhile 
our big Talbots ran up and down the great trunk road, 
ending up, at the victorious finale of the battle, on the 
Piave bank beside the great broken bridge, amid the 
polyglot litter of the departed enemy. The medical 
and staff officers of each successive division had co- 
operated with us in the most practical manner, and were 
most appreciative of our efforts to get the wounded 
quickly off the field. On the basis of their reports, 
the Military Medical Board of the Italian Army pub- 
lished a eulogium of our work during the battle. 

The Austrians had brought a few light cannon across 
the Piave, but generally speaking their excellent artillery 
had had to stay on the farther shore. And since they 
had lost the mastery of the air, thanks not a little to the 



214 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

British airmen in the spring,* they could not get suffi- 
cient information as to how to direct their fire in accord- 
ance with the changing phases of the battle on the 
Italian side of the river. They adopted the policy of 
plumping big shells on the country lanes, of which 
they had the accurate range, thereby often blocking 
them for a time. But the Italians, always careful of 
their road communications, were quick to fill up the 
holes. As compared with San Gabriele or Vodice, it 
was a battle of machine-gun and rifle wounds, at least 
for the Italians. 

Thus, though the river had been crossed by the 
Austrian infantry, it was still the Italians' great defence. 
The midsummer rain fell, the river rose, and the foot- 
bridges, always under the fire of the Italian artillery 
and of aeroplanes, Italian and British, became each day 
a more precarious means of sending over men, food, 
and rifle ammunition. Towards the end of the week 
the enemy prisoners complained of hunger and eagerly 
ate the loaves shared with them by their kindly captors. 
As the Italians held their ground more firmly than 



* In twelve months in Italy the British destroyed 386 enemy 
aeroplanes and twenty-seven balloons, besides thirty-three machines 
driven down out of control. This is a large proportion of the not 
very great Austrian total of aircraft. The British loss for the year 
was forty-seven machines missing and three balloons destroyed. 



THE JUNE BATTLE, 1918. 215 

ever, the Austrians, eight days after they had crossed 
the river, sUpped back across it under cover of night. 

Then we all knew that Italy had been saved, and 
we rejoiced together. But we did not know that Austro- 
Hungary had no less surely been doomed, and must 
now disappear from the category of States. Diaz' 
defensive victory of June 19 18 may be added to the 
long list of " decisive battles of the world." 



EPILOGUE. 

THE FINAL VICTORY. 

The Devil sought dominion, 

And the clouds were filled with thunder ; 

We could hear his clanging pinion 
As the peoples fled asunder ; 

But his legions now are stalling. 

His iron thrones are falling. 

We can hear the nations calling 
For the bright, broad day. 

G. W. Y., December 1918. 

' I 'HIS book, as I have explained in the Preface, had 
already been one-third of it written in the leisure of 
last autumn in Italy, while the great news from France, 
the Balkans, and Turkey was pouring in every day, 
raising our hopes of a present deliverance. At the same 
time a series of political revolutions were overthrowing 
the old Austro-Hungarian State, which, having come 
to subsist on Prussian victories, now looked up unfed. 
It had been going about deadly sick, ever since one of 
its twin Premiers had publicly confessed to a complete 
repulse and a loss of 100,000 * men in the June offen- 

* The Italians reckoned the enemy loss at 200,000. 

216 



THE FINAL VICTORY. 217 

sive on the Piave. So during the autumn the old 
Austria-Hungary passed quietly away, and by a process 
more like that of nature's growth than of man's vio- 
lence, was dissolved into the vigorous and turbulent 
races of which it had been composed. 

But though the Austro-Hungarian State was dead, 
the Austro-Hungarian army was still alive. And it was 
the army alone that had ever given real unity to the 
Empire. Men remembered that in 1848, when there 
had been a similar crisis, the army under Radetzky, 
having triumphed in Italy, restored the fallen State 
for another seventy years. It might, indeed, be hoped 
that on this occasion the tide of time had set in more 
strongly against the Dynasts ; and it was certain that 
the British had broken the Hindenburg Line, the enemy's 
backbone. But there still stood firm in its positions the 
Austro-Hungarian army, the epitome of the coercive 
union of the races who were politically flying asunder. 
Until the army was destroyed the old system was still 
in being. 

The battle that was fought and won in the last week 
of October was to prove how an army will go on fight- 
ing just because it is an army ; how it will fight well 
until it suffers a decided reverse, and will then, and 
only then, go completely to bits for political and moral 



2i8 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

reasons. If the Austrians had held the Piave line on 
October 27-29, 19 18, their army would not have dis- 
integrated ; and conversely, if the Italians had defeated 
Radetzky at Custozza, the army might then have broken 
up for political reasons, and the Emperor Franz-Josef 
might have reigned a few months instead of seventy 
years. In time of revolution the winning or losing of 
battles counts not less but more than in times of stable 
government. 

In the early days of October Diaz and Badoglio had 
already made their plan for the destruction of the Aus- 
trian forces.* The main break-through was to be 
effected by the crossing of the Middle Piave on both 
sides of the Montello by the Twelfth, Eighth, and 
Tenth Italian Armies, the last-named being commanded 

* See the ofi&cial Italian dispatch on the battle, recently pub- 
lished. I here quote the following sentences from Lord Cavan's 
dispatch {Times, December 5, 1918) : — " On October 6th I went to 
Comando Supremo at General Diaz' request. General Diaz at this 
interview offered me the command of a mixed Italian-British army 
with the view of undertaking offensive operations at an early 
date. I expressed my high appreciation of the honour conferred 
on me. 

" On October 13th General Diaz held a conference of Army Com- 
manders at Comando Supremo, at which he explained his plans for 
the forthcoming offensive. 

" The general plan for the main attack was to advance across the 
Piave with the Tenth, Eighth, and Twelfth Italian Armies — to drive a 
wedge between Fifth and Sixth Austrian Armies — forcing the Fifth 



THE FINAL VICTORY. 219 

by Lord Cavan, who brought down the greater part of 
his three British divisions from the Asiago plateau. 
(See Maps XI. and XII., pages 178, 198 above, for 
this chapter.) 

But before the break-through on the Piave was 
attempted, the Fourth Italian Army began, at dawn 
on October 24th, a furious assault on the enemy's 
mountain positions on the Grappa massif between 
the Piave and the Brenta. This operation, though 
not itself immediately successful, served as a containing 
action to help the subsequent attacks across the river. 



Army eastwards and threatening the communications of the Sixth 
Army running through the Valmarino Valley. 

" The Fourth Army was simultaneously to take the ofEensive in 
the Grappa sector. 

" The task allotted to the Tenth Army was to reach the Livenza 
between Portobuffole and Sacile, and thus protect the flank of the 
Eighth and Twelfth Armies in their move northwards. 

" The co-ordination of the attacks of the Tenth, Eighth, and Twelfth 
Armies was entrusted to General Cavigha, the Commander of the 
Eighth ItaUan Army. 

" On October nth the Headquarters of the Tenth Army, the Army 
which had been placed under my command, were established near 
Treviso. 

" The Tenth Army in the first instance was to consist of the nth 
ItaHan and 14th British Corps." 

Lord Cavan had succeeded General Plumer in command of the 
British forces in Italy when the latter went back to Ypres in March. 
Criticism is sometimes made of parts of British policy or want of 
policy in Italy during the war, especially as to propaganda, etc. At 
any rate the most important item of all, the choice of commanders for 
the British forces in Italy, was twice done to perfection. If any one 
could have replaced General Plumer it was Lord Cavan. 



220 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

Similarly, in the Macedonian offensive, the British 
and Greeks had held the Bulgarians by their fiercely- 
contested onslaught at Doiran, which enabled the Ser- 
bians and French to carry through successfully their 
magnificent penetration of the line beyond Monastir. 
On the Grappa the Austrian army, so far from showing 
itself already in process of dissolution, resisted with the 
utmost tenacity. Some of the heights were captured 
and recaptured alternately eight times ; the Arditi 
were thrown in again and again ; and the Italians 
stood up day after day to losses as severe as those 
that their regiments had been accustomed to suffer in 
the great offensives on the Isonzo. 

But the Fourth Army on Grappa was doing what 
was required of it, and meanwhile all three armies on 
the Piave succeeded in their objective. The Twelfth, 
where the Alpini and the French vied with each other 
in a fierce rivalry, fought its way up the Piave gorge 
and cut the communications of the Austrians, who were 
defending the Grappa massif, so that they too joined 
the general debandade. 

The Eighth Army, working from the Montello, 
succeeded on October 27th in throwing a division across 
the Piave on their left, but failed on their right flank 
next to the British on account of bridging difficulties. 



THE FINAL VICTORY. 221 

Things for a moment looked serious ; but prompt co- 
operation between the AUies saved the situation. On 
the night of October 27th-28th two divisions from the 
Eighth Army, under General Basso, passed over the 
British bridges to the south, erected and previously 
used by Lord Cavan's Tenth Army. But these bridges 
also gave way before the requisite force had crossed. 
General Basso, however, once across, turned northwards, 
and without reckoning his numbers or his isolated 
position, " with soldierly instinct," as Lord Cavan 
writes, attacked the enemy, and cleared the front of 
the Eighth Army, from which he had been detached. 
That army was thus enabled to cross the river and 
race forward over hill and dale to Vittorio, thence 
to cut the Valmarino communications of the enemy. 

Meanwhile the Tenth Army, under Lord Cavan, 
the right wing of the whole attack, had enjoyed an even 
more rapid success. Lord Cavan's forces consisted of 
the 14th British Army Corps on the north, and on the 
south the nth Italian Army Corps, with which our 
Unit was serving. In the Tenth Army sector, as in- 
deed in front of the whole line of attack, the bed of 
the Piave was a mile and a half broad, consisting of 
islands of shingle and brushwood, divided by half a 
dozen or more channels of the river flowing " ten 



222 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR 

miles an hour in time of flood," and " three and a 
half miles an hour at summer level." If, therefore, 
it rained heavily for many hours in the mountains 
above, the crossing would be impossible. And it 
was late in November ! There was very little of 
" foregone conclusion " about the battle when it 
began. 

On the night of October 23rd-24th, by a brilliant 
preliminary operation, the northern part of the largest 
island, the Grave di Papadopoli, was captured by the 
British infantry, who crossed the swirling flood in flat- 
bottomed boats, rowed by pontieri of the Italian genio. 
The way was thus prepared for the great attack by the 
English and the Italian corps of the Tenth Army on 
the night of October 26th-27th. 

The preliminary bombardment began half an hour 
before midnight, and with it began the rain. It was 
an anxious business waiting by the river bank for the 
attack at dawn, knowing that if the rain did not stop — 
and why should it stop in November ? — ^the whole 
scheme must miscarry. But stop it did, when the 
attack began, and it never rained again anywhere where 
I was till I had been a fortnight in Trieste, except for 
half an hour's drizzle on the morning of October 29th. 
The weather-god, like every one else, had begun to 



THE FINAL VICTORY. 223 

Wilsoneggiare , as the Italian papers called the prevailing 
political tendency in Europe. 

At 6.45 a.m., October 27th, the British and the 
Italians, under Lord Cavan's orders, moved to the 
attack, to capture the remaining part of the system of 
islands and the farther shore. A fair number of Italian 
and Austrian wounded were carried back across the 
river to our ambulances in the first twenty-four hours. 
But we saw less of this battle than of others at which 
we had assisted, because the infantry went right over 
the islands, through the swift channels that took their 
toll of them, and away across country beyond the river, 
leaving miles behind them every wheeled vehicle — 
artillery, supplies, and ambulances — unable to cross the 
channels until the bridges were made. The British 
bridges, as already recorded, broke down on the night 
of October 27th-28th ; and the Italian bridges for 
carrying wheeled traffic, which were our concern, were 
only completed to the farther shore after dusk on the 
evening of October 28th. 

On the afternoon of the 27th I had walked over to 
the farther bank by footbridges, passing on the islands 
a few corpses and many piles of Boche helmets thrown 
away wherever the Austrians had fled from the Italian 
attack. The infantry were already far forward, out of 



224 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

sight even from the farther bank. On the morning of 
the 28th, Dyne and I walked into San Polo, a village 
two miles beyond the farther bank, and found all the 
Italians there in high spirits, though very hungry, 
captured Austrian cannon still facing down the street, 
and all the signs of recent fighting. But the line was 
somewhere far ahead. 

On our way back we spoke to the officers of the 
Italian genio^ who were working, tools in hands, with 
their men, to finish the bridges and let the artillery pass 
over that night. They told us that the final bridge 
would be ready at dusk. So Baker fetched up two Ford 
ambulances, the only motors that had any chance over 
such broken ground, and we waited on the spot while 
our friends of the genio finished the last bridge. We 
thus got over to the far shore with the two motor 
ambulances a couple of hours before any other 
wheeled vehicle crossed the river by the route of 
the nth Army Corps. Then we fairly stuck for the 
night at the bottom of the muddy lane leading to 
San Polo. 

The first things to follow over, before midnight, were 
British artillery, and horse ambulances, coming over by 
the Italian route, I suppose in return for the loan of 
the British bridges the night before to the Italians 



^ass^a^mmtm^mttfsm 



THE FINAL VICTORY. 225 

from the Eighth Army. Certainly the Allies played 
in well together. 

In the course of several hours between night and 
dawn we got our two Fords up that abominable lane, 
\7hich seemed to be a long chain of shell craters filled 
with mud. So in the early hours of the 29th we arrived 
in San Polo. Baker took the cellars of its ruined chateau 
for our out-station, and the two cars began carrying 
back wounded from the front over the more practicable 
roads to the east ; but from San Polo they had still for 
some days to come to be carried back by hand across 
the river. The Italian infantry we found on the morn- 
ing of the 29th already far ahead, in more apparent 
danger from their own guns away behind the Piave 
than from any further enemy resistance in front. 

In fact, the back of the business had been broken, 
as far as the Tenth Army was concerned, in the short, 
fierce struggle on the 27th, when the Austrians proved 
incapable of standing up to our men. They put up 
their last serious rearguard action on the evening of 
the 29th, after which, as Lord Cavan writes, " the 
defeat became a rout." 

From this moment forward we had but few wounded 
to carry ; but even so, the ambulances found it hard 
work merely to keep in touch with the Bersaglieri of 

(2,041) 15 



226 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

the 23rd and the infantry of the 37th Divisions in their 
wild rush to the Tagliamento and beyond. Our diffi- 
culty was every one's difficulty, the fact that the retiring 
Austrians had blown up the bridges over the series 
of rivers, though happily, in their haste, not quite all 
of them. Both British and Italian troops suffered 
severely from want of food, especially in the early 
days of the crossing, because the wheeled traffic could 
not keep up with the infantry any faster than the 
pontoons could be slung over the rivers. One began, 
by hard experience, to understand many of the minor 
but all-important reasons why the enemy had followed 
up so slowly over the same ground a year before ; 
and then it had been pouring and the rivers flooded 
whereas now the weather at least was perfect. 

The Austrian armies were now everywhere in flight 
and dissolution. The enemy's divisions in line had 
mostly fought well, but the Czechs and Poles in reserve 
scarcely fired a shot, and surrendered wholesale on being 
dispatched to relieve the broken divisions. Once the 
retreat set in, moral gave way throughout, except among 
some of the German- Austrians. Even the Magyars 
wished only to get back to defend their new independent 
State. The fairly won military success of the Twelfth, 
Eighth, and Tenth Armies, operating on the political 



THE FINAL VICTORY. 227 

situation, had cleared an almost unopposed field of 
advance in mountain and plain for all the other armies 
of Italy. The way to Trent and Trieste was open. 

They were wonderful and happy days for every one, 
those days of the great deliverance, with the barbarian 
once more fleeing from the soil sacred through the cen- 
turies to the Latin race. But only we who had traversed 
the same roads in such bitterness of spirit twelve months 
before could feel it to the full. *' O giornate del nostro 
riscatto ! " The inhabitants of Veneto and Friuli, after 
their year of servitude, were going about in happy crowds, 
hundreds together, men, women, and children, unable 
to do anything but laugh and talk with their liberators, 
who, themselves radiant with delight, were many of 
them wearing evergreen branches in token of victory. 

Every day, as we advanced, we met ever longer 
columns of weedy prisoners, their hands deep in their 
grey overcoat pockets, shepherded in thousands at a time 
by two or three cheerful Tommies, or two or three 
majestic mounted Carabinieri. Many, I think, had 
*' bowed the head for bread " rather than remain with 
a starving army or return to a starving land. On the 
side of every road and in every market town stood the 
yellow cannon and lorries, and all the deserted gear of 
the disbanding hosts. And in the ditches along every 



228 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

high road and lane between the Piave islands and Trieste 
the soldiers had thrown away their " Dolly Varden " 
Boche helmets ; sometimes sooner, sometimes later in 
the flight each man had divested himself of that heavy 
badge of servitude. So it was given us to see " proud 
Austria rammed to wreck.'* 

On the night of November 2nd it chanced that I 
had a long way to walk back beyond the Piave, not 
wishing to take the car back over the bridge. I was 
walking under the stars through the scenes of our June 
battle, ghostly in the starlight. As I went, I became 
aware of a singing and cheering all around for miles 
away. I was quite alone, and could only guess its 
significance ; but when at last I struck our old Treviso 
main road, I asked the first group of soldiers I met what 
was the meaning of the still-continued, universal shout. 
They told me that the Austrians had sent a general to 
the Comando Supremo to ask for an armistice. I shall 
never forget the distant and continuous noise of a whole 
army scattered over the plain, shouting all night in its 
joy under the glistening winter stars because their war- 
fare was accomplished, and Europe at last was free. 

During these days, for the first time since I had 
been in Italy, I heard that Austrian prisoners had been 
insulted, though never injured. This new feeling of 



THE FINAL VICTORY. 229 

personal anger against the Austrian soldiery as human 
beings did not last long among their good-natured cap- 
tors. It was entirely due to the tales told by the liber- 
ated populations of robbery and ill-treatment. The 
stories of the inhabitants, of which I heard many, were 
all of the same tenor. All their cattle and all the food 
that they produced had been taken and never paid for, 
while they themselves had been kept on a very low 
ration. Again, as in Shelley's day, the peasant of the 
Venetian plain had 

" heaped his grain 
In the gamer of his foe." 

Everything movable of any value had been packed up 
and sent off into Austria-Hungary. The robbery of the 
whole countryside for the benefit of the conquerors had 
been organized and official ; but there had not been a 
systematized destruction of what could not be taken 
off, such as the Germans had carried out in France. 

As to personal treatment, they all spoke of their 
year's taskmasters as brutte bestie. They had no other 
word for them in any village between Piave and Isonzo. 
They all said the Magyars (" Ungaresi ") were the worst 
brutes, which, from what I heard and saw in Serbia in 
1914, did not surprise me. The Croats, Bohemians, 
and even German-Austrian privates had as a rule be- 



230 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

haved tolerably. The worst tyranny had come from 
the officers, especially the higher officers, and, most of 
all, the allied officers of Germany proper, who had 
always urged harsh treatment. God grant that that 
type of "higher officer" may now disappear out of 
Austria and out of Europe. It has caused enough 
misery for one planet in one aeon. 

Our own Villa Trento presented a sorry sight, when 
we reached it a day or two after the armistice came 
into force, as it did at 3 p.m. November 4th. The 
Villa had been gutted from roof to cellar, and with no 
gentle hand. Filth and military litter were all that there 
was between the bare walls of that once fair mansion. 
Outside its gates five deserted Austrian cannon stood, 
as if doing penance for the sack. Among our old friends 
of the neighbouring peasantry, the women and children 
had survived, though starved and robbed ; but many 
of the fathers of families had been carried off into slavery 
in Hungary, and, alas ! some had not returned even in 
December. Whether and how they died will probably 
never be known. One grotesque story was told us : at 
the Retreat, we left behind at the Villa certain pigs 
that we had been fattening for Christmas, 1917. Some 
Hungarian soldiers, we now learned, had eaten of them 
voraciously on their first arrival, and died next day ! A 



aaf^"--- ■''"■'"'" -I'-- 111 I riiiMirria"Tr" -j-^^^^^^ggggggijgga^ggsm^sie-- 



THE FINAL VICTORY. 231 

military inquest had been held, to inquire if the Eng- 
lish had poisoned the pigs. But the post-mortem showed 
that death had resulted solely from the greed and 
voracity of starved men let loose on abundant and 
succulent fare. 

Between Piave and Tagliamento the Austrians in 
their flight had left their hospitals doctorless, foodless, 
and in the last stage of human misery, just as they had 
done in Northern Serbia when the Serbs drove them 
out of it in November 19 14. Over four years, the one 
sight forcibly recalled to me the other. In the several 
Austrian hospitals that I visited, the situation had been 
to some extent saved by the gallant work of Italian 
civilian women of the locality, who, though untrained, 
had stuck to their grim post, helping their wounded 
persecutors in their dreadful plight, before the British 
and Italian armies were able to come to the rescue. 

Another of the many forms taken by the misery that 
needs " must be at every famous victory," was the 
suffering of hundreds of thousands of Italian prisoners, 
freed before the armistice by the revolutions in the lands 
of their captivity, and now escaping for their lives out 
of starving Austria, where a fifth of their number had 
perished. On every road we met them by thousands, 
patiently plodding along while strength to walk was in 



232 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

them, finding themselves still in an almost foodless land 
so long as they were east of the broken railway bridges 
of Piave and Tagliamento. We were beginning to 
emerge, more clearly every day as we moved eastward, 
out of the problems of the finished war into the new 
tasks of the armistice, the settling of the starving and 
disorganized peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. 
Each day we learnt by fresh proof what a grim weapon 
had been wielded in the British blockade. 

Now that we were well inside the enemy's lines, we 
saw on every hand traces of that terrible pressure — for 
instance, in the condition of the main roads beyond the 
Piave, cut to pieces by the heavy iron tyres of the motors, 
for want of rubber, and left unmended for want of well- 
fed workmen. Instead of repairing them the Austrians 
preferred to run light railways along the side of some 
of the larger roads. The Italians, who trusted to their 
Fiat lorries for supply, at once got to work on repairing 
the road surface, and in a week had transformed con- 
ditions of transport in Venetia and Friuli. So, too, 
behind the enemy's Piave battle front, we had found 
very little work done on trench preparation. The 
Italians had done infinitely more on the other side of the 
river. The want of labour, and of food to strengthen 
labour's hands, had clearly been a main weakness of 



^^^llfiHaHHI 



THE FINAL VICTORY. 333 

Austria for a year past. When we got back into our 
old fighting area of the Isonzo, its ruins were as un- 
touched as if we had left it only a week before. Much 
of the Italian ammunition had been left for a year, 
lying by the roadside, as though for want of strength to 
pick it up and carry it away. 

In the relief of all the various kinds of human suffer- 
ing that lay around us. Sir Courtauld Thomson, the 
Chief Commissioner of the British Red Cross in the 
Mediterranean, took a most active personal part, with 
very beneficent results. All who had the privilege of 
serving under Sir Courtauld that autimm have the same 
feeling of gratitude for his sure support in all difficulties, 
his wise and considerate guidance, and the social pleas- 
ures of his hospitality and friendship. 

Our part was now drawing to an end. One of our 
ambulances, advancing with the division from Arsiero, 
had entered Trento, and had carried back patients from 
half-way up the Brenner. But we had withdrawn the 
rest of our cars from the mountains in order to head 
for Trieste, the goal that we had come out to seek more 
than three years before. The last of my " Scenes from 
Italy's War " shall be the view that Geoffrey Young 
and I had at midday on November 9, 1918, when our 



234 SCENES FROM ITALY'S WAR. 

touring car came suddenly round a corner on a cliff 
above the blue Adriatic, and there down below us, 
three miles away, lay Trieste, her port and her city, 
united to her mother Italy after many years of longing 
and four years of fear and blood. We two had to- 
gether sought so long to come there and to see just 
this sight, and now we had got through, and there 
indeed it lay, a sure and visible sign of the wide and 
universal victory that had been won for the people and 
by the people of Italy, of England, and of all the strug- 
gling world. 



List of Italian Losses in the War. 

The Supreme Army Command announces that the 
total losses suffered by the Italian army on all fronts 
during the war were as follows : — 

Killed . . 460,000, including 16,362 officers. 
Wounded . 947,000, including 33,347 officers. 
On fronts other than the Italian the losses were : — 

Killed 7,934 

Wounded I5>i96 

It is estimated that the number of men totally or 
partially disabled owing to wounds or illness contracted 
at the front exceeds half a million. 

Owing to the emigration of so many millions, prin- 
cipally of males economically active, Italy when the 
war broke out contained only 34,671,000 souls, of whom 
only 8,931,000 were males from eighteen to sixty-five 
years old. Of these she mobilized more than 5,000,000. 

The British Red Cross in Italy carried during the 
war 400,000 sick and wounded at the front. Our Unit 
carried of these 177,522, of whom 40,918 were stretcher 
cases, and our Unit cars ran 1,319,316 kilometres. 



93s 



INDEX. 

Alexander, F. (B.R.C. 3rd Unit), Bassano, 210. 



81, 121, 187. 
Allan, Hamish, 112. 
Alpini, the, 83, 88-90, 204, 206, 

220. 
America, 139, 185, 199-200. 
American Red Cross, 199-200. 
Amiens, 206. 

Angelantonio, General, 106. 
Aosta, Duchess of, 105. 
Aosta, Duke of, 90, 123, 167, 189. 
AquUeia, 49. 80. 
Arditi, the, 86-88, 206, 220. 
Arqua, 201. 
Arsiero, 79, 202, 233. 
Arundel, Philip, 112. 
Asiago plateau, 62, 67, 77-79, 89, 

114, 189, 197, 199, 201, 202, 

219. 
Astico, river, yj, 202, 204. 

Badoglio, General, 91, 93, 129- 

131, 142, 198, 218. 
Bainsizza plateau, 65, 72, 125, 129, 

137, 141-153, 160-162, 165, 179, 

180. 
Bairnsfather, Captain, 203. 
Baker, Philip J., 39, 132, 136, 144, 

151, 179, 180, 224, 225. 
Baldo Rossi, Professor, 151, 179. 
Baruzzi, Aureho, 95-96. 
Baske, 148. 



Bassi, General, 151. 

Bassi, Ugo, 193. 

Basso, General, 221. 

Bate, 148, 150, 161. 

Battisti, Cesare, 205. 

Becker, Sir Walter, 201. 

Bemhardi, 6. 

BersagUeri, the, 83-86, 88, 128, 

212, 225. 
Bertolini, On., 16. 
Bismarck, 6. 
Bocchia, Major, 100. 
Bonomo, General, 106. 
Boriani, General, 206. 
Bow Fell, 133. 
Braithwaite, John, 201. 
Brenner pass, 233. 
Brenta, river, 219. 
Brock, Dr., 103-104, 180, 186. 
Brown, Horatio, 14. 
Browning, Robert, 35, 123. 
Buchan, John, 160. 
Billow, von, 16, 22, 28, 29. 

Cadore, 44, 166, 178. 

Cadoma, General, 13, 24, 25, 77, 

80, 164, 168, 174, 178, 190, 192. 
Canale, 128, 146, 161. 
Capello, General, 90, 91, loi, 102, 

109, 129, 142, 162. 
Capocelatro, Captain, 155. 



•36 



t.'>lWl l :"." ' H.JJL ' . ' J 



INDEX. 



237 



Caporetto, 3, 44, 58, 126, 127, 136, 

142, 162-178, 190, 191, 196, 

202, 212. 
Carabinieri, the, 53, 73, 87, 88, 181, 

227. 
Carlo, Emperor, 118. 
Camic Alps, 178. 
Carso, the, 45, 49, 62, 65, 80-82, 

90, 121-124, 166, 167, 178, 187. 
Cavan, Lord, 124, 218, 219, 221, 

223, 225. 
Cavigha, General, 219. 
Cavour, 2, 4, 23, 28, 35. 
" Cecco Beppe." See Francis 

Joseph. 
Cervignano, 108, 109. 
Chartres, 41. 
Ciceruacchio, 19, 28. 
Cimone, Monte, 77-79, 202. 
Cirieci, Colonel, 206. 
Cividale, 165, 177, 178, 183. 
Codroipo, 181-185. 
Committee in Aid of Italian 

Wounded, 38, 201. 
Conegliano, 180, 186. 
Corada, Monte, 71, 73, 126, 131, 

140. 
Cormons, 42, 43, 49, 52, 55, 162, 

181. 
Como, rock, 205, 206. 
Croce, Benedetto, 3. 
Custozza, 218. 
Czechs (Bohemians), 140, 206, 208, 

226, 229. 

D'Annunzio, 3, 20. 

Davis, Mr. (3rd B.R.C. Unit), 124. 

De Lisi, Major, 119. 

Diaz, General, 198, 210-212, 215, 

218. 
Doblar, 140. 
Doiran, 220. 



Dolomites, the, 204, 205. 
Dyne, Herbert, 147, 201, 224. 

EnA, General, 24. 
Elia (of the thousand), 24. 
Erzberger, 16, 22. 
Euganean hills, 201. 

Faiti, 123. 

Farragiana, Major, 155. 
Feltre, 178. 
Ferrero, 3. 

Filippi, Colonel Filippo di, 61, 62. 
Florence, 191. 
Fogazzaro, 3, 79. 
Formosa house, 39. 
Francis Joseph, Emperor, 117-118, 
218. 

Gabriele. See San Gabriele, 
Monte. 

Gandolfi, Colonel, 81. 

Gargaro, 150. 

Garibaldi, i, 2, 5, 12, 24, 33, 34, 
118, 147, 159, 169, 188. 

Garibaldi, Anita, 118. 

Garibaldi, Bruno, 34. 

Garibaldi, Itaha, 104. 

Garibaldi, General Peppino, 35 

Garibaldi, Ricciotti, 29, 30. 

Genoa, 42. 

Gibraltar, 31. 

GHpin, E. H., 38. 

Giolitti, 5, 9, 13-22, 28, 29. 

Gladstone, W. E., 32, 35. 

Gleichen, Countess, 108. 

Gonzaga, General Prince, 143, 147, 
161. 

Gorizia, 42, 45, 54, 55, 59, 72, 77, 
80, 90-102, 109-116, 123, 124, 
126, 127, 129, 145, 150, 151, 157, 
162, 165, 167, 176, 178-180. 



238 



INDEX. 



Gotti, Colonel, 84, 128. 
Granatieri, the, 55, 90. 
Grappa, Monte, 197, 204, 210, 219, 

220. 
Grave di Papadopoli, 222. 
Greene, Plunkett, 113. 

Hamilton, General, 105, 121, 124, 

187. 
Hardy, Thomas, 50, 51. 
Havre, 41. 

Hay ley. Colonel, 187. 
Hermada, Monte, 90, 123-124. 
Hindenburg line, 217. 
HoUings, Mrs,, 108. 

IsoNzo, river. See passim Chaps. 

in.-vii. 

Italian Red Cross Society, 108, 151, 
179. 

Jelenik, Monte, 140-142. 
Jerusalem, 195. 

Kambresko, 127. 
Kitchener, Lord, 45. 
Kobilek, Monte, 143, 144. 
Kuk, Monte, 62, 72-75, 90, 93, 102, 
128-136, 145, 159. 

Lago di Garda, 44. 
La Marmora, General, 83. 
Latisana, 185, 187 
Leghorn, 117. 
Lemberg, 25, 165. 
Liga, 96, 127. 
Livenza, 189, 219. 
Lloyd George, 115, 196. 
Lorn, 142, 177. 
Lonsdale, Lord, 115. 
Lucas, E. v., 120. 
Ludendorff, 163, 



Lusitania, the, 10. 

M'Clure, Mr., 99. 
Magyars, the, 226, 229. 
Mantua, 159, 193-195. 
Manzano, San Giovanni di, 108- 

109. 
Marconi, 3. 
Marriage, G. C, 194. 
Matajur, Monte, 166. 
Matilda, Sister, 11 6- 117. 
Mazzini, 5, 12, 35, 190. 
Medeazza, 123. 
Metcalfe, George, 157. 
Mickelden, 133. 
Milan, 19, 119, 192. 
Milner, Lord, 40. 
Modane, 41, 42. 
Monastir, 220. 
Monson, Lord, 24, 39, 120. 
Montello, the, 196, 209, 210, 218, 

220. 
Morino, Colonel, 42, 106, 180. 

Napoleon III., i. 

Nathan, Ernesto, 43. 

Nero, Monte, 44, 45, 88, 176, 177, 

185. 
Northcli£fe, Lord, 99-100. 
Nota, Colonel Celio, 70. 

Ogston, Sir Alexander, 104, 107, 
Orlando, 192. 

Orsi, Professor Pietro, 119. 
Oslavia, 45, 52, 90, 95, no. 

Padua, 40, 188. 

Palliovo, 136. 

Papa, General, 161. 

Pasubio, Monte, 89, 198, 202, 204- 

206, 211. 
Paulucci, Count, 192, 193. 



INDEX. 



239 



Penman, F., 179. 
Perusini, Captain, 58, 59. 
Piano delle Fugazze pass, 204. 
Piave, river, 90, 160, 167, 187, 189, 

196, 199, 202, 209-225, 231, 232. 
Planina, Monte, 71, 74, 126, 137. 
Plava, 71-75, 101-102, 126-142, 

146, 152, 167, 176. 
Plezzo, 177. 
Plumer, General, 196. 
Podgora, 45, 47, 49, 62, 90, 95-98, 

loi, 109-111. 
Poles, the, 226. 
Ponte di Piave, 210, 211. 
Pordenone, 186, 187. 
Posina, torrent, 202. 
Power, Matron, 104, 186. 
Pria Fora, Monte, 77-79, 203. 
Puffele, 201. 
Putti, Professor, 186. 

QuiscA, 31, 47-56, 64, 69-70, 75, 
76, 80, 82, 99-100, 134, 144. 

Radetzky, General, 217, 218. 

Rapallo, 164, 196. 

Ravne, 144, 146-152, 160, 161, 178. 

Ricasoli, 23. 

Rodd, Sir Rennell, Ambassador, 

29, 40. 
Robot, brook, 142. 143, 152. 
Rome, 19,20,23-30,39,43, 191,208. 
Rovereto, 204, 
Rumania, 107, 115. 
Russell, Lord John, 32, 35. 
Russia and Russians, 25, 50, 107, 

III, 115, 139, 153, 161, 173, 198, 

200. 

Sabotino, Monte, 31, 42, 45-52, 
55-58, 62, 71, 72, 75, 90-94, 109, 
III, 126, 133-136, 156. 



Sacchi, Aspirante medico, 159. 

Sacile, 219. 

Sagrado, 81. 

Salandra, 5, 6, 13-20, 192. 

Salcano, 54, 99-101, iii, 145, 155, 

'^57, 159- 
San Floriano, 52, 56, 57. 
San Gabriele, Monte, 54, 91, 99- 

102, no, 112, 134, 135, 143, 145, 

150-162, 165, 214. 
San Marco, heights, 109, no, 

123. 
San Martino, 52, 76. 
San Polo, 224, 225. 
Santa Caterina, Monte, 54, no, 

"^55, 158. 
Santa Dona, 210. 
Santa Lucia, 126, 142, 177. 
Santo, Monte, 91, loi, 133-135, 

141, 143-144. 150. 153- 
Santucci, General, 106-107. 
Sargant, F. W. (2nd B.R.C. Unit), 

136. 
Scarsella, Major, 138. 
Sella di Dol road, 151-159. 
Serbia and Serbians, 56, 229, 231. 
Sessions, Lionel, 112, 157. 
Shelley, 229. 

Silver Thimble Fund, 201. 
Silvester, G., 157. 
Slovenes, the, 76, 176. 
Somme, the, 33, 79. 
Sonnino, 5, 13-20. 
Southampton, 41. 
Spelta, Major, 69. 
Stanley, Sir Arthur, 38, 39. 
Steed, Wickham, 99. 
Stelvio, 44, 50. 
Swinburne, 35. 

Taguamento, river, 165, 181-185, 
189, 226, 231, 232. 



240 



INDEX. 



Ternovo plateau, 144-148, 153, 

160. 
Thompson, Dr. W. E., 104. 
Thomson, Sir Courtauld, 24, 233. 
Tolmino, 44, 45, 88, 126, 140, 142, 

176, 177. 
Trentino, 67, 77-79. 
Trento, 15, 204, 205, 227, 233. 
Treviso, 119, 193, 197, 209, 211, 

228. 
Trieste, 15, 45, 65, 77, 80, 90, 109, 

121, 123, 222, 227, 233, 234. 
Turin, 42, 167, 191. 

Udine, 34, 42, 119, 165, i66, 181, 
183, 184. 

Val di Prigione, 205. 
Val Grune, 137, 138. 
Vallarsa, 202, 204-207. 
Valmarino, 219, 221. 
Venice, 119-120, 168, 197. 
Venturi, General, 99-100. 
Verdi, 113, 114. 
Verhovlje, 72-74, 129-131. 
Villa Trento, 103-106, 157, 180, 
181, 183, 194, 230. 



Villa Trieste, 201. 

Vipacco, river, 124. 

Vipulzano, 47, 100. 

Vittorio, 221. 

Vittorio Emanuele II., 5. 

Vittorio Emanuele III., 13, 59-61, 

173- 
Vodice, 133, 142-148, 151, 152, 

160, 214. 
Vogercek, torrent, 142. 
Vrh, 140, 146, 148, 161. 

Warsaw, 25. 

Watkins, Mrs., 108, 109. 

Whitbarrow, 122. 

Wilson, President, 139, 208, 223. 

Young, Geoffrey, 39, 70, 98, 99, 
117, 136, 145, 151. 155-157, 179. 
186. 

Young, Sir George, 39. 

Ypres, 39, 80, 82. 

Zagora, 72, 75, 129, 132, 136, 145. 
Zita, Empress, 118. 
Zupelli, General, 24. 



THE END. 



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